I just saw the second installment of Ken Burns' documentary about prohibition. There was a lot in there that I didn't know before, and it raised some interesting questions. For example, whatever happened to neighborhood bars?
When I was a kid they were all over the place. In some neighborhoods you could find a bar on almost every corner. They weren't especially rowdy, in fact they were sort of "family" bars, but singing and shouting would spill out into the streets on some nights, and occasionally you'd see falling down drunks trying to make their way home at night.
If you lived in the neighborhood saloon era, that institution would have seemed as permanent as motherhood, but the saloons are mostly gone now, as are cigarettes and men's hats. Things change. Drunkenness was once seen as romantic and funny. Drunks were known as jovial philosophers and truth tellers, and were on the cutting edge of the jazz era. Nowadays they're considered so....so yesterday.
Burns' documentary probably wants us to draw comparisons with today's War on Drugs. I don't smoke marijuana but I wish it would be made legal so we could put to rest all the fuss that's made about it. More serious drugs are another matter, though. If they become widespread we'll have a permanent underclass in this country, and nobody wants that.
The philosopher inside me says that on principal people have a right to destroy themselves, and that I should just mind my own business. The practical side of me says that numbers matter. A few people taking serious drugs is just an expression of an alternative lifestyle: a lot of people doing the same thing is a major threat to the stability of society.
My own philosophy about the War on Drugs (hard drugs, that is) is that it's worth fighting, even if it ultimately can't be won. Sometimes a long fight is necessary just to prevent things from getting worse than they are, and winning or losing isn't the point.
Will this problem ever be resolved? My guess is that it will, probably within a few decades. The time will come when serious drugs just aren't considered fashionable anymore. When hard rock and hippies recede into the past, the drugs and the romantic view of them that came out of that culture will recede with them. Hard drugs will diminish, just like saloons and cigarettes did.
Maybe the real menace of this type lies in the future. Imagine an electronic brain stimulator that, at the push of a button, floods the pleasure centers of the brain with the absolute ultimate sensation of pleasure. If you think about it, nothing could ever induce you to stop pushing a button like that. No alternative could offer a higher reward. You'd push it til you starved to death.
11 comments:
"You'd push it til you starved to death. " -- Check "Brainstorm" (1983) when a research scientist loops the pleasure sensation of a subject having an orgasm... he just sits in his chair shuddering, like a seizure. Ken Burns has done a great job. I'm hooked.
Hey Eddie I love your blog! You got great ideas and post very inspiring pictures!
I wanted to say something, though. There's other ways of fighting drug abuse than the war on drugs! Sweden (where I live) and the Netherlands are pretty similar in the way our society is built up, but Sweden has had a zero tolerance policy which is based on fines, penalties and negative stigmatization whereas the Netherlands has a policy called 'harm reduction' where junkies are given clean needles and Methadone. Sweden has less people that try drugs, but a higher rate of addiction and fatalities than the Netherlands, especially when it comes to dangerous drugs like opiates and amphetamine.
Drug abuse (that is destructive) is not something that should be encouraged, or even accepted really, but the current war on drugs policies make the lives of drug addicts a lot worse than if the drugs were freely available. Drug use is something which no amount of penalties will ever put a stop to.
Look up harm reduction, it's a humane and surprisingly effective method. Sorry about the wall of text!
Also keep up the good work!!!
Are you a fan of Boardwalk Empire? a lot of critics have dismissed it as empty spectacle but there's a lot of character depth and amazing set pieces on the show. About half the major players on the Prohibition doc are characters on the show like George Remus and Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein is played by Michael Stulberg who was the star of the Cohen Brothers A Simple Man and is absolutely mesmerizing.
I'm going to disagree.
I think it is necessary to legalise all drugs.
The crime element will disappear almost immediately. All the murders and deaths in the drug trade will vanish. The drug squads will stop murdering innocent people by accident(Check the link for info)http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
and the way pimps control prostitutes through addiction will also be a thing of the past (Speaking of which, I think prostitution should also be legal).
I very much doubt that just because drugs are legal, people will rush out to buy them. Cigarettes are legal, and as you said, more and more people are quitting.
You talk about a permanent underclass being created if hard drugs are legal...well let me tell ya, I live in South Africa, and Tik (Meth) is already creating that underclass.(It has to be noted that apartheid created the class divide through the racial divide, but tik is taking an existing problem, and making it much much worse) Thousands upon thousands of kids-some as young as 8-are meth addicts, and it's just getting worse. This causes these kids to steal, and join gangs etc. If there was a legal way for them to get the drugs I think it will eliminate a large part of the crime problem.
I also don't think people use the very dangerous drugs because they are fashionable. Some dangerous drugs, like coke do work in this way, but coke isn't nearly as deadly as heroin and meth.
The drugs that people use because it may be fashionable are usually given a worse rap than they deserve. Ecstasy for example has been judged to be safer than cigarettes and alcohol. check out the link .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223708/Alcohol-worse-Ecstasy-says-drugs-tsar.html?ITO=1490
You may think I'm a loon, but I truly believe that governments use petty things like the war on drugs to distract us.
On a side note, I commented last time on the "John K: Genius" post, and although I still don't like that Kirk Douglas character, The Simpsons intro was a work of brilliance. I just really didn't like the Kirk Douglas design.
Anyway, hope I didn't bore you!
Ciao.
If you want to see the local bar, just come to NYC. My parents' neighborhood is composed of many Irish immigrants, and there is a stretch of about 10 blocks where you'll find two bars to each side of the street with plenty of late-night singing as they pour out onto those streets. Some of these bars have fancy seating around large round tables where the singing is done indoors.
As for the drug wars, I think we're losing. Strategy has to be changed. Just think of the taxes that could be gathered simply by legalizing marijuana. The government is foolish not to get past this one.
Re hard drugs, it's time that something other than hard time should be given to those unfortunate enough to have fallen to them. I think you're wrong about their eventually going away because they've gone out of fashion. Drugs haven't receded into the past over the last couple of centuries, I doubt they will. Opium has been around for a long time.
Commenter Eric Dellblad has the best answer. It's necessary for our society to act a bit more passionately in helping to cure those fallen to the drugs.
"Prohibition made you want to cry in your beer and then denied you the beer to cry in": Don Marquis
Erik, Michael, Martinus: I had roughly the same belief you guys did about this subject til I saw a couple of TV documentaries that alleged that methadone doesn't work.
These films said that, contrary to popular opinion, it was addictive, and that hardcore addicts just use it to suppliment their heroin use. One of the films even challenged the way statistics on methadone are gathered.
It was alleged that some of the statistics on methadone were based on the testimony of prisoners who were never addicts, but lied about it in order to get methadone in prison. How much of this is true, I don't know. I wish we had reliable statistics.
In any case heroin isn't the major problem anymore. So far as I know, crystal meth and crack are what most addicts take, and I'm not aware that methadone is used to treat those cases.
A war on drugs doesn't rely exclusively on arrests, and it doesn't have to exclude methadone-type treatments if they can be proven to work. I'm open to any alternative to prison that works...but prison is the back-up when all else fails.
I'm sure that drug arrests do more harm to some addicts than drugs do, a case where the cure seems to be worse than the disease. This might not be as irrational as it seems, though. Addicts hurt other people directly and indirectly through scams, theft, bad influence on kids and abandonment of them, murder, accidents, expensive health treatments, etc. Considering the effect of the laws on them exclusively might be too narrow a focus.
About dangerous drugs disappearing in the future...I overstated that. What I should have said is that their use will probably diminish. I say that because I've seen so many other so-called permanent things vanish.
Martinus: Thanks for the link to the accidental death site. I disagree with what's said there, but it was worth reading. I'll read the ecstacy article later today.
Anon: Boardwalk Empire? The title sounds great. I'll check it out.
Why is this drawing by Xurxo G.Penalta so funny?
http://lulubonanza.tumblr.com/post/11037998006/drawn-by-xurxo-g-penalta-site-deviantart
I liked how the documentary showed that the repeal was used as an opportunity to create laws that restricted how alcohol was used/sold and taxed. For instance home brewing of beer wasn't legal in the US until 1978. Home distillation for personal use is still illegal.
An interesting history and look back at beer before prohibition can be found here
History of the Growler
It examines pre and post prohibition. Pre-prohibition, children were used to fetch beer for adults.
Martinus: I read the article about a U.K. minister wanting to downgrade ecstacy. Fascinating! Many thanks!
Post a Comment