• Prohibition

    A friend of mine asked me today, after reading this article, “Has prohibition *ever* worked?”

    My first thought was a resounding, not “no”, but “hell no”.

    But then I thought about it for a few minutes.  Prohibition means to prohibit something.  Has anything ever been prohibited and it not only ‘worked’ but people actually stopped doing that thing?

    A few seconds thought brought me to slavery.  That was prohibited and, after a… well… civil war, accepted by the people of the US.  Most people in the US think that slavery, a human owning and controlling another human, is fundamentally wrong.  Sadly, I do have to include that “most” in there.

    So, my second idea was that when something is prohibited that is fundamentally morally flawed in the first place, then prohibition works.  Of course, I wonder if it’s the prohibition that is cause or that the society is changing in that direction anyway.  It probably went a lot faster with the prohibition in place though.

    But then I got to thinking again (always dangerous) and wondering why prohibition doesn’t seem to work.

    My present thoughts, having all of 2 or 3 minutes of intense concentration on the subject (liberally interspersed with periods of snacking on corn chips and salsa), is that if something is prohibited, then people will think one of three things about it.

    The first is that the thing that is prohibited is something that they would never do anyway.  For the majority of people, this is how we view slavery and hard drugs and other things.  We don’t feel like we’ve lost liberty because we wouldn’t ever do that in the first place.

    The second is that of someone who wants to do that thing, has or does that thing, and has now become criminal.  Maybe what they were doing is morally wrong anyway (child pornography for example).  But now that thing has been prohibited.  They have lost what they feel is a freedom.   The freedom to do whatever they want.  This may even cause them to riot or cause a civil war or something.

    The third group is that group that doesn’t or hasn’t done the thing and may not, but still feels incensed when something is prohibited anyway (like drugs in this case).  Perhaps the thing doesn’t actually harm anyone (occasional marijuana use) or perhaps it’s just a freedom that we used to have that we don’t anymore (say the right to give a blow job to anyone we choose).

    What determines whether prohibition is successful is the ratios of those three groups and how pissed off that third group is.  Which way that third group swings can be the difference between universal acceptance (or at least no riots and war) or civil war.

    Please keep in mind that this is one of my stream of consciousness posts.  So I’m thinking as I’m typing and am perfectly free to change my mind.

    So what do you guys think?  Am I on the right track?

    Will a prohibition not supported by the majority of the people ever work?

    Does morality play a part in whether it works or not?

    There also may be a portion of this controlled by ubiquity.  Prohibition of firearms just will never work in the US, there are too many unregistered firearms and too many people will never give them up.  At least, at this point in time.  Who knows about the future.  As an aside, I’ve had this webpage staring at me for a while, begging for a post, but couldn’t do a full one on it.  Please check it out.

    OK… enough of my thoughts, what do you think?

    Category: GovernmentLife

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    Article by: Smilodon's Retreat