Was prohabition wrong?

[Ian Gentles]

It amazes me that alcohol is still legal, and yes I'm being simplistic. But when we think of illness, accidents, crime, all caused by alcohol, and that other adictive drugs are illegal, its quite amazing. How many lives, millions of dollers, pounds, euros, etc would be saved each year if it were not for alcohol!? My suggestion would be that alcohol has to be sold at a lower alcohol content, that stricter laws be brought in for alcohol induced crimes ie driving under the influence! Maybe a restriction on how many drinks a bar etc can sell to one person. We are planning to ban alcohol on all publick transport in UK, a step foreward. We have a strong anti smoking lobbies in most nations now, why havent we got a stronger anti alcohol lobbies:fav03 ?

[Hans Deventer]

Ask Al Capone and his "speakeasy's". It seems those days had some trouble with illegal stuff?

The issue of course is, why do people drink? They get something out of that. And as long as that hole isn't filled, that need isn't met, no law will help.

[Bruce Carriker]

Was prohibition wrong? Or was it merely naive?

[Billy Cox]

The vast majority of people who drink alcohol are not going to live the horror stories of failed marriages, alcohol poisoning, drunk-driving accidents, and physiological dependence. It is a comparatively small risk when compared with shooting up meth or freebasing cocaine; in which almost all users become addicted and blow their lives away.

Prohibition was based on the rationale that any use of alcohol is an unacceptable risk and the law forced that decision on the entire nation (although not very well). I personally consider it one of the most embarrassing chapters for Christianity in the 20th Century.

[Brad Mercer]

The first problem is that it's a lot easier to make alcohol than tobacco or marijuana. It can be distilled from practically anything. I remember my grandfather talking about the great alcoholic drink his father distilled from potatoes. The phrase from the prohibition days was "bathtub gin", because it could literally be made in any individual residence, from ingredients basic foodstuffs that are impossible to ban.

The second problem is the same for alcohol as for other mind-altering drugs, which we have also utterly failed to eliminate. People will do whatever they can to medicate their emotional pain. A "solution" that merely insists that people leave their pain unmedicated simply isn't going to work. The risk of prison, or even execution, is better than living with unbearable, unmedicated pain. You see that from the seemingly daily parade of stories of Westerners being executed for drug smuggling in countries like Indonesia. They'll trade one drug for another, or trade drugs for eating (or starving) themselves to death, or cutting themselves (self-mutilation). They'll trade a drug like marijuana, where the number of "highs" in a truckload is relatively small for one like crack where the number of "highs" in a truckloard is much larger. Or they trade a drug that's hard to make to a drug that's easier to make. Deny them every other way of medicating their pain and they may simply descend into madness, like some form of psychosis.

The most powerful weapon in the world against drugs is also the most powerful weapon against greed, anorexia and gossip: the Great Physician heals the pain and fills the emptiness and gives us the only adequate source of worth and identity. He makes us "free indeed."

I don't know how to structure a system of government around that premise, but I know how to structure my own life and relationships around it, and in great, historic revivals, societies get better. The laws tend to follow, rather than lead that change, though.

Brad

[Billy Cox]

I think it is more accurate to say that people abuse alcohol to medicate pain.

It seems naive to think that all people who drink do so for that reason. At least that has been my experience in rubbing elbows with people who drink out of social expectation or to relax...but not to get plastered. (and become the subject of office gossip)

[Brad Mercer]

Billy,

Sure. The personal and societal effects of intoxication were the problems I understood Ian to be addressing when he raised the issue of prohibition or other measures to make alcohol less available. Certainly many people routinely have a glass of wine as a standard part of their dinner and, far from destroying their liver and their home, obtain actual health benefits for their heart, according to recent studies.

Brad

I think it is more accurate to say that people abuse alcohol to medicate pain.

It seems naive to think that all people who drink do so for that reason. At least that has been my experience in rubbing elbows with people who drink out of social expectation or to relax...but not to get plastered. (and become the subject of office gossip)

[Dennis McClung]

Corn won't grow at all on Rockey Top
The soil's too rockey by far
That's why all the folks on Rockey Top
Drink their corn from a jar

[Michael R. Gentry]

Visited Branson, MO and took a tour of the winery this summer, on way home from Gen. Assembly :)

They have one huge vat that survived prohibition ... reason, some could still be made legally for medical reasons only. All other had to be bootlegged.

I have pastored at Paris for 15 years now ... during that time I have had four members take wine as directed by their doctors ... If I remember correctly the dose was 2 oz. before bedtime. As far as I know, none of them abused the medication. Also, two actually consulted with me before doing it. The cost of the wine was much cheaper than the medication they would have had to purchase. And since those two were on very limited incomes ... the doctor thought that to be an adequate substitute for other more expensive medication.