Parallel Developments in American History Prohibition Vs. the War on Drugs

The United States has gone through two periods of great social reform that have largely been a complete failure. One of these periods is the Prohibition of the 1920’s, a time when alcohol was banned from America. The other is the great War on Drugs started by Richard Nixon in the 70’s and furthered by subsequent presidents like Reagan and Bush. While noble in its origin, the legislature that was passed was doomed to failure in America. It was doomed to fail because no amount of governmental interference in such a profitable product, with such a high demand could succeed in a free nation built on the ideas of civil liberties and capitalism. The economic problems that arise when dealing with the laws are astronomical in size, and the bureaucracy that developed around both issues is one of the main faults. In both cases it was an experiment noble in cause to alleviate perceived societal flaws.
The idea of prohibiting the liquor started to gain support in the 1880’s with groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and its star, Carry Nation. The angry little woman would wield a hatchet, breaking up saloons and bars, frightening the innocent patrons enjoying a drink. She was never arrested because she would break up saloons in Kansas, which had a prohibition law. There was no way an officer could arrest her for damaging property that wasn’t supposed to be there. (Barry 4)
The WCTU gained more support and soon more organized groups came about such as the Prohibition Party. But it was in 1895 that the most powerful political force to support temperance was formed, the Anti-Saloon league. The league was deeply connected with the protestant church and wielded great lobbying powers. (Barry 7)
The many problems that alcoholism brought about, and the horrible image of the saloon started to change the minds of many Americans in the early 20th century, and by 1919 the tactics of the Anti-Saloon league were able to win the states approval of the 18th amendment which forbade the manufacture, transportation, or sale of intoxicating liquor. There was only one problem, many Americans were still determined to drink. So speakeasies sprouted up all across the country, with rumrunners and moonshiners providing the liquor. Who was it that sold this now illegal and much sought after drink, gangs.
With so many people willing to break the law it wasn’t long for some entrepreneurial types to catch on to the fact that there was millions to be made. These previously small time gangs who only dabbled in gambling and prostitution, now had a very lucrative new business. Gangs sprang up all over the country and started thousands of speakeasies in order to please the public. As many as 30000 speakeasies were in operation in New York City and as many as 100000 in Chicago. The most infamous of these gangs was John Torrio and Al Capone’s gang in Chicago.
Capone and Torrio raked in millions of dollars during the twenties, an estimated $30 million by Capone himself each year. The corruption in Chicago was so widespread that most gang members were only fined, never truly arrested. Torrio once boldly exclaimed, “I own the police.” (Barry 36) . This was largely true. Capone and his gang were above the law for a while. Gangs in Chicago paid the police little attention and would drive down busy streets shooting at each other. In one case an assassination attempt on Capone was made when he was finishing lunch at the Hawthorn Restaurant in Cicero. On that day September 20th 1926, a black touring car roared down the street past the restaurant with a man firing a tommy gun out of the window. Following that car there was a dummy police car with sirens and lights. Everyone in the restaurant jumped to their feet to see what was going on and Capone almost joined them, but his quick thinking bodyguard pulled him under the table. Then a convoy of ten cars slowly went by the restaurant and each on sprayed the building with their tommy guns. After the tenth car went by, a man got out , went to the entrance and sprayed the inside with a ten second burst from his tommy gun. (Barry 46)
The amazing thing about this scene was that not one person was killed and the only injury was a woman who got a piece of shattered glass in her eye. Capone generously paid for her expensive surgery and for the repair of all the buildings damaged in the raid. While killings in Chicago had become almost commonplace there was one event that changed the romantic view the public had of the gangster, and that event was the St. Valentines Day Massacre.
Bugsy Moran and his gang had been working with Capone distributing the Old Log Cabin brand whiskey for a little while until Moran thought he was being overcharged. At this point he told Capone that he was switching to a cheaper brand. Unfortunately for Moran, his customers preferred the Log Cabin brand. So Moran asked Capone if he could sell his brand again but Al told him he had already been replaced. Soon shipments of Old Log Cabin whiskey began to be hijacked and somehow Bugsy was ably to offer the old brand again. Capone and his associates, the Purple Gang of Detroit, had no misconceptions as to what was going on. They put a double agent in contact with Moran and told him that he had some shipments of the Purple Gang’s whiskey to sell. Bugsy and the O’Banion gang took the bait. For a while Moran thought he was buying whiskey that had been stolen from Capone, but in actuality he was playing right in to his hand. Then one day the double agent told Bugsy that he had a particularly large shipment coming in, well, he couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. So Bugsy told him to deliver the shipment to his garage on North Clark Street where his entire staff would be waiting.(Barry 59)
The date set for the delivery was February 14th 1929, a cold and windy St. Valentines Day. In the morning a police car pulled up to the Moran garage and out stepped two men in police uniform and three in plain clothes. They walked in and ordered the men to stand facing the wall, the men complied thinking that it was an ordinary raid and that they would be out of jail shortly. Unfortunately the men weren’t cops, the two in uniform were hired guns from St. Louis and the other three were Capone gangsters. The impersonators then opened up with .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine guns and nearly cut them in half. They were then blasted with shotguns just to make sure. (Barry 59).
Bugsy was a lucky man. He was not among the seven victims, although a young optometrist who resembled him was, Dr R. H. Schwimmer. The good doctor liked to pal around with gangsters. Moran and another were walking towards the garage when they saw the uniformed men, thinking it was a legitimate raid, they casually ran away.
The St. Valentines Day Massacre marks a significant turning point in the public opinion of gangsters. What had once been a Romantic view of the gangster became one of utter disgust. More and more Americans started to feel that prohibition had done more harm than good. It crowded prisons, corrupted officials and paved the way for the horrible acts of inhumanity perpetrated by gangs.
The increased criminalization of drugs led to the same problems that Chicago had seen in the twenties with alcohol. Stepping up enforcement and cracking down on supplies didn’t always work to rid the streets of dangerous criminals, instead it bred many more desperate and cunning minds than before. Men such as Frank Lucas who were able to amass unimaginable fortunes selling heroin on the streets of New York. Lucas was involved in the infamous cadaver connection, where bricks of pure heroin were stashed inside the coffins of fallen servicemen. He was able to make $1 million dollars a day selling he “Blue Magic” on 116th street in Harlem. (Frank Lucas bio)
Lucas was able to keep his Country Boys rich throughout the early seventies by buying the smack at 100% purity and then reselling it at 10% pure, creating a profit margin astronomical in size. His reign as top gangster in Harlem came crashing down in 1975 when he was arrested and later sentenced to 70 years in prison. Lucas cut a deal and gave up the names of 100 corrupt police officers which led to the indictment of 52 members of the Special Investigation unit of the NYPD. He was released after five years but sent right back for seven more after breaking parole.
The spirit of the twenties can be characterized as a time of great change. It was the first time in American history that the amount of people living in cities outnumbered the rural population. It was in the cities that the image of the flapper and the defiance of prohibition laws took place. The generally dry agrarian population of the U.S. was loosing its influence as the Jazz age took over. (Barry 21)
This time of consumerism and opulence gave rise to the richest middle-class in all the world. The pursuit of the great American Dream was the common goal of the era. Many young middle-class men and women sought to imitate the truly rich by doing what they thought the truly rich did, and that was drink. The poorer working class couldn’t afford the higher priced hard liquors and missed their cheap beer, but the middle-class was looking to break with traditions. This great American dream is best characterized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is a fictional novel set in Long Island during the Jazz Age. The main character is Nick Caraway who travels from the Midwest out to the city after WWI. There he rents a house next to the extraordinarily wealthy Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is known to throw lavish parties that last all night but his true intentions for throwing the parties is to reconnect with his lost sweetheart, Daisy Buchanan. On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a fictionalized area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Another noble experiment began in the late sixties involving drugs and the culture they spawned. Again Americans began to see the dregs of society, the criminals, as otherwise good people who just have an addiction to a horrible substance. They thought that the removal of the substance would solve the problems. Unfortunately the mere act of criminalizing the substances wasn’t the solution, no, it would take billions and billions of dollars to make it seem like the War on Drugs was working, but even then it has just led to many of the same problems the prohibition of alcohol led to. Problems such as gang warfare, more deadly substances, decreased democracy, and the wasteful spending of tax dollars. (White)
The War on Drugs started to gain momentum as LBJ was loosing popularity. His “great society” hadn’t alleviated many problems and seemed like a big waste of money to many Americans. His greatest mistake was seemingly being lax on crime. The overall discontent with the war in Vietnam had spawned many protests, and with this counterculture grew the proliferation of drug use especially marijuana and hallucinogens. But the drug that was the cause for concern during this time was heroin.
Heroin was seen as an inner city problem that mainly affected the blacks. This is how the stereotypical black junkie came to be what people visualized when they thought of crime. The crimes usually attributed to junkies were muggings, murder and petty theft. It was true that a large amount of crimes were committed by junkies and the study by Robert DuPont concluded that 44% of inmates tested positive for heroin when they entered the D.C jail in 1969. (Baum 19).
With the new data in and polls telling government that most white males were fed up with the civil rights movement, republicans saw an opportunity to take over the White house. Richard Nixon took office in January of 1969 and set about making many reforms. He coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1972 to describe the increased enforcement of the prohibition on drugs. He also started the Drug Enforcement Agency by consolidating all of the previous departments like the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), and others into one. The DEA is given the task of dealing with drug smuggling and use within the US. (Baum 68)
After Nixon resigned from office Gerald Ford took over. Much of Ford’s drug policy was uneventful compared to Nixon’s. But the overall feeling was that of a truce. All the old proponents had fallen with Nixon and the old ideas of “root causes” were coming back. Most surprisingly under Ford there was serious thought given to the legalization of marijuana as suggested by his Federal Drug Strategy. (Baum 150
During the early days of Carter‘s presidency drug enforcement was not a big problem. Vietnam was over, addicts were getting treatment(mainly from Nixon’s Methadone treatment plan), crime wasn’t in the public eye, and there wasn’t anything to be gained from making an issue out of the war on drugs. Carter’s drug czar, Peter Bourne, suggested that the reform of marijuana punishment should take place. Carter supported this and instituted civil fines for marijuana possession instead of jail time which was only effective at crowding prisons and ruining lives. (Baum110)
What Carter did not anticipate was that his harm-reduction policies towards drugs ran counter to the enormous amount of propaganda and rhetoric that had been previously put forth. In the public eye pot was addictive and led to heroin, and they would make themselves know with groups such as the Nosy Parents group and other anti-drug groups.( Baum 89)
Another drug also started to come to light in the late seventies and that drug was cocaine. Cocaine was starting to gain popularity among the upper middle-class and rich during the late seventies and throughout the eighties. The horrible path that cocaine would cut through American society was unknown to Bourne and would come back to haunt him. (White)
The time of the “esoteric debate” was coming to an end as Dick Williams put it, “ Let’s declare drug abuse wrong and get on with it.” That they did and in 1981 Ronald Reagan took office, so began the greatest increase in drug enforcement since the “War” had been declared in 1972. Reagan’s conservative nature looked to cut government spending in any area, so what got cut, the methadone treatment slots program that had been in affect for over a decade. Large grants were going to replace the costly treatment instead. Other programs that got cut at this time were child nutrition (down 34%), urban development action grants (down 35%), education block grants (down 38%), school milk programs (down 78%) and energy conservation ( down 83%). The only programs that didn’t get cut were the “ hard” side of enforcement such as the Coast Guard which enjoyed a 44% increase in its budget. (Baum 145)
On June 24, 1982, Reagan declared his new War on Drugs.
“ ‘I was not present at the Battle of Verdun in World War I,’ he said. ‘But from that battle I learned of that horrendous time of an old French soldier who said something we could all heed. He said, ‘There are no impossible situations. There are only people who think they’re impossible.’’(Baum 165)
“ ‘We can put this drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement,’ he said. ‘We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up a battle flag.’” (Baum 166).
The Verdun reference was quite strange: the battle is known for the loss of half a million men on both sides and accomplished very little.
Reagan then began to really bring the war to the War on Drugs. In on of his first legislative victories, Reagan revised the 103-year-old law that kept the military out of civilian affairs. The Posse Comitatus Act had made it illegal for the military to act as police on US territory or waters, but the Reagan administration wanted a clearly defined role for the military’s active role in the War on Drugs. The navy would assist the Coast guard in spotting smugglers and the air force was a valuable ally watching the skies. This all came with a price of course and the Pentagon saw it’s funding go from $1 million dollars to $196 million dollars.
Technology played a huge role in both the Roaring Twenties and the 80’s. The twenties were a time of modernization and mass production which led to cheaper goods for people. The 80’s went through a very similar time of consumerism marked by advancements in science and technology. One advancement that had an enormous impact on life in the twenties, and prohibition especially was the automobile. (Barry 44)
The automobile was invented in Europe during the late 1800’s and was never much of a success, mainly because the vehicles were expensive and unreliable. But after WWI had modernized American factories and set the stage for mass production, autos would become cheap and very popular.
Ford’s Model t was the most popular auto of the time. He sold over 15 million units by 1927. The new consumers of this product were in fact gangsters. They quickly realized the importance of the car and adopted it to suit their means. Some cars were modified to benefit the gangsters by installing thick bulletproof glass or armor on the doors. Gangs soon created strategies reminiscent of an army’s cavalry by moving in quick, striking fast with machine guns and then screeching away.
The 1980’s saw many scientific and technological advancements that helped and greatly hurt society. One such advancement was in the production of “crack cocaine”. This new potent product was made by mixing powdered cocaine with baking soda and water and then heating it. The oil that was extracted was then cooled into a hydrate and smoked out of a pipe. The vapor was quickly absorbed by the lungs and caused the user to feel a very quick and intense high, but was left with an insatiable appetite for more soon after. (White)
The crack epidemic is said by the DEA to have started in 1984 and ended in 1990, in which time it caused enormous amounts of damage to users, communities, and the prison system. By taking extreme measures against crack, president Reagan is partially to blame for the over-crowded prison systems that do much more harm than good. Today the United States has the highest percentage of its population locked up, over 2.2 million inmates.
One novel that explored the drug culture and the end of the hippie generation was Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book deals with the end of the counterculture of the 60’s and the cynicism that followed. The novel is a somewhat autobiographical account of events that happened to Thompson on a trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400. The two men are given $300 and use the majority of it to purchase ludicrous amounts of drugs. What followed was a descent into the reasons of drug culture and the delusion of the American dream.
The thirteen years of prohibition that America went through is very similar to the more recent War on Drugs. Both time periods saw remarkable change both socially and politically. The causes of these restricting times were deeply rooted in a national sense of disgust with crime and the want for a return to normal times, good times. Unfortunately such radical reform laws are nearly unworkable in American society. This is mainly due to the fact that the true American dream is to have the freedom to earn money. When the government took away some of it’s citizens’ freedoms, the citizens disobeyed the law. When the government indirectly made disobeying the law so profitable to anyone willing to grasp at the opportunity, it set the stage for a never ending battle. For sometimes it is the forbidden fruit that tastes sweeter than all else.