The Prohibition President

Politics

- Matt Welch

In a January 8 prime-time border security speech so unpersuasive that only 2 percent of Quinnipiac poll respondents said it changed their minds, President Donald Trump did the country a rare rhetorical favor. By thoroughly blurring the lines between immigration and drug policy—at one point he claimed that“the border wall would very quickly pay for itself” because “the cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year”—the president offered an unintentional lesson that the country has needed to learn for far too long: Prohibition kills.

Ask most reasonable adults why the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages, was a resounding policy failure, and they won’t hesitate:You cannot arrest out of existence a good or behavior enjoyed by millions of people. Black markets produce dangerous products peddled for high profit margins by violent criminals. Since there can’t possibly be enough cops, selective enforcement will undermine respect for the rule of law and incentivize corruption.

Yet when invited to apply the same logic to other activities, policy makers and commentators have been blanking for 85 years. Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns,even while promoting his documentary Prohibition in 2011, could not see parallels to the drug war, telling Reason’s Nick Gillespie, “No, I think it’s less to that. Alcohol is used by every culture since there have been human beings. Drugs are a subcultural thing.”