Alcohol in the USA was banned after one of the most massive propaganda campaigns in history exceeded only now by gun control.
The war on drugs is like gun control a monument to man's continues stupidity in believing the control of objects can change or rehabilitate people without any proof or even vague evidence of the mechanism of this ridiculous assumed ability to control actions. There is more written on gun control that any other subject yet not one study has identified this magic means objects use to control people and influence their decisions.
there is no argument both the laws and people are an ass but in the gas of guns the supreme laws based on our Creator given rights state clear "shall not be infringed". How do you interpret that. Who gives the law the power to decide it may be infringed if or when...
The law is simply what citizens say it is and agree to and the power of the majority is also limited in protection of the minorities rights. However government in its illegitimate quest for control tells citizens the majority rules and punishes those who object.
There is no point in arguing semantics when the principle is flawed. Government has no legal right to make such laws but if the people do not object and the watch dogs are to stupid and lazy to inform the people get the laws they deserve. Unproven "It's for the public good" is not a legal argument when rights are in the balance. It is emotional blackmail.
Prohibition: Roots of Prohibition | PBS
You may note the similarities to all propaganda campaigns including gun control andf the war on drugs. All of these are social problems and point to bad governance and management of the causes of these problems. Under what pretence of sanity do we *believe* the lies of agenda driven people who manipulate the system for their own desires and benefit?
The activists who promoted National Prohibition (1920-1933) acted in a time when there was little scientific knowledge about the effects of alcohol and they had strange ideas. Consider these ridiculous assertions:
- Alcohol is the dirtiest drug we have. It permeates and damages all tissue. No other drug can cause the same degree of harm that it does.
- Alcohol is harmful to the body (no level of consumption indicated).
- Alcohol is a poison, and drinking it might lead to death.
- Alcohol is toxic (no level of consumption indicated).
- The effects of alcohol on men (no level of consumption indicated) are that hormone levels change, causing lower sex drive and enlarged breasts.
- Alcohol is a gateway drug leading people into illicit drug use.
- Alcohol (no level of consumption indicated) can cause deterioration of the heart muscle.
Astonishingly, all these statements, which are very misleading at best, were not made by prohibitionists of old but by officials representing governmental agencies of today. Significantly, the comments are not based on scientific evidence but instead seem to reflect a neo-prohibitionist effort to stigmatize alcohol.
The effort to stigmatize alcohol includes promoting the prohibitionist belief that there is no difference between moderate drinking and alcohol abuse--the two are portrayed as one and the same. This leads the U.S. Department of Education, for example, to direct schools and colleges to reject educational programs which promote responsible drinking among adults and instead favor a simplistic call for total abstinence.
[h=5]American Issue Publishing Company[/h] The American Issue Publishing Company, incorporated in 1909, was the holding company of the
Anti-Saloon League of America. Its printing presses operated 24 hours a day and it employed 200 people in the small town of Westerville, Ohio, where the company was headquartered. Within the first three years of its existence, the publishing house was producing about 250,000,000 (one-quarter billion) book pages per month, and the quantity increased yearly. This dwarfed the enormous output of the National Temperance Society and Publishing House, which took over half a century to print one billion pages.
The American Issue Publishing Company played a major role in advancing the interests of the temperance movement. Not only did it publish an enormous quantity of temperance materials but it also produce some of the most prestigious temperance publications, including
The Standard Encyclopedia of the Liquor Problem, a multi-volume work edited by Ernest Cherrington and published between 1925 and 1930.
[h=5]Anti-Saloon League[/h] The
Anti-Saloon League was a non-partisan organization established in 1893 that focused on the single issue of prohibition. The League had branches across the United States to work with churches in marshalling resources for the prohibition fight.
From 1948 until 1950 it was known as the Temperance League, from 1950 to 1964 it was called the National Temperance League; from then it has been known as the American Council on Alcohol Problems. The current name disguises its prohibitionist agenda.
The best single source of information about the
Anti-Saloon League is Peter H. Odegard,
Pressure Politics: Story of the Anti-Saloon League. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928, reprinted 1966); the League’s archives and other materials are now located at the Anti-Saloon home page (wpl.lib.oh.us/AntiSaloon/)
[h=5]Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA)[/h] CASA has a long record of producing highly suspect papers about alcohol that are later discredited. For example, a researcher "examined some of the references in (a) CASA paper and found the conclusions in the articles to be shockingly different from the way CASA depicted them." Report after report by CASA has been exposed as lacking credibility, leading
The Washington Times to observe that CASA has a "proven disdain for the facts."
[h=5]Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY)[/h] The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) was up and funded by the Pew trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The stated mission of CAMY is to monitor "the marketing practices of the alcohol industry to focus attention and action on industry practices that jeopardize the health and safety of America's youth."
CAMY explains that "reducing high rates of underage alcohol consumption and the suffering caused by alcohol-related injuries and death among young people" requires limiting the appeal of alcohol beverages to young people and their access to them." It seeks to create "public outrage" against
alcohol advertising to achieve its objective.
[h=5]Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)[/h] The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is not a science center but, by its own admission, a public advocacy action center. CSPI demonstrates a continuing pattern of presenting alarming but erroneous and misleading statistics to promote its agenda. A major goal of CSPI is reducing the alcohol consumption of adults, even among moderate drinkers. A full-time director, George Hacker, and his staff work toward this goal through the group’s Alcohol Policies Project.
[h=5]Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP)[/h] The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) is a massively-funded federal agency that aggressively promotes the reduction-of-consumption or neo-prohibition approach to reduce alcohol problems: "Less alcohol is always still too much alcohol."
Although it is a federal agency supported by taxpayers, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention has long been guilty of illegally misappropriating taxpayer money for lobbying, of censoring citizens with whom it disagrees, of self-servingly distorting statistics, and of using its power to abuse innocent Americans.
[h=5]Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol Problems[/h] The Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol Problems vigorously promotes a temperance agenda and should more accurately be called the Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol. It is a coalition of temperance groups co-chaired by George Hacker of the Alcohol Policies Project and Stacia Murphy of the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence (NCADD).
Members of the Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol Problems include the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon Church), the American Council on Alcohol Problems (earlier called the
Anti-Saloon League), the Temperance League of Kentucky, the General Board of Global Ministries, and the Illinois Church Action on Alcohol Problems.
[h=5]Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)[/h] Mothers Against Drunk Driving was created in 1980 to reduce drunk driving and the death and injury that it can cause. Over time, temperance forces have gained control of MADD and it has largely become anti-alcohol rather than anti-drunk driving.
[h=5]Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse (AMA)[/h] The American Medical Association (AMA) first passed a resolution supporting abstinence from alcohol even before National Prohibition was imposed in 1920 and continues to support it to this day.
[h=5]Scientific Temperance Federation[/h] The Scientific Temperance Federation was founded in 1906 upon the death of Mary Hunt, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction.
Because of the substantial fortune she had amassed in promoting compulsory temperance education, and the tens of millions of textbooks this required, the Scientific Temperance Federation was able to engage in a wide variety of activities to promote the temperance movement and prohibition. A major nation-wide project was an innovative “Education on Wheels” project that took temperance education directly to people at their homes and farms.
[h=5]Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)[/h] The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in 1874 and claims to be the oldest voluntary, non-sectarian women’s organization in continuous existence in the world. WCTU membership peaked at about 200,000 members in the late 19th century.