Time to End the Second Prohibition

America’s First Prohibition, on alcohol, ended in 1933, not because it failed—although it most certainly had. Not because the murder rate in America’s cities doubled during 13 years of the “noble experiment.” Not because the enforcement of a law that attempted to prevent people from doing what they went on doing anyway had corrupted the police, courts, legislatures and businesses of the nation. Not because Prohibition handed a share of the economy to a criminal underworld that grew richer than U.S. Steel without paying a penny in tax. Nor because the federal prison population swelled by more than five hundred per cent to accommodate all those who were caught (a small percentage of the offending total) producing, importing, selling and drinking the devil’s liquid.
No, it ended because the Great Crash of 1929, the banking crisis that followed, the loss of tax revenues from business that had gone bust and millions of workers without jobs made it too expensive. The Great Depression killed Prohibition, because the United States just couldn’t afford it.
When Barack Hussein Obama assumes office on January 20th, he should remember the precedent his party set in 1933 and end the Second Prohibition, on drugs. This will create an immediate tax windfall to give the Treasury back more than it lost on Iraq, the bank bailouts and the annual subsidy to Israel. It would also relieve the American taxpayer of the burden of enforcing laws that Pew Center on the States’ Public Performance Project estimated [pdf] cost federal and state governments $20 billion a year. Not a bad savings, when times are tough, especially when the so-called “war on drugs” is failing as surely as the crusade against alcohol did 80 years ago.

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/time_to_end_the_second_prohibition/