It's a good thing speeding isn't illegal, otherwise the prisons would be full of speeders.
Thank God you weren't running the show back then because you would have made it go on a lot longer and this country would have suffered a lot more. When your efforts didn't work, you'd say it's because we weren't cracking down enough and you'd crank it up a few more notches.
The problem wasn't with enforcement, or with not cracking down hard enough. The problem was with the law itself. It was a half measure that didn't work.
It was a half measure because possession of alcohol was legal. So we would have needed to make possession a crime, and then yes, we would have ended up locking up a lot of drinkers. That wouldn't have worked either, so we would have had to keep kicking it up a notch here and there, increasing punishments, expanding the police force, allowing for more and more intrusive searches, and it would have gone on and on and we would have kept kicking it up a notch here and there because none of it would have worked.
It's all half measures, Moonman, until we get serious with it like Chairman Mao got serious with opium. That's where this leads to. When we throw the Constitution out the window and start shooting people in the back of the head because we suspect they are using drugs and shipping a bunch off to reeducation camps, when we become a society of informants, a totalitarian police state where everyone tows the party line or suffers serious consequences, then we'll see some real gains in the war on drugs. Slowly but surely we inch toward that direction when we just keep kicking the drug war up a notch. All this kicking it up a notch never really works because it is all just half measures. It's not the kind of total war that would be required to make a serious dent in the problem. The thing is though that the people of this country will not stand for the kind of measures that would be required to get the kind of results you are after. The half measures will never work but the people won't stand for a total war. This is the way it's going to be with the war on drugs and this is the way it would have been with Alcohol Prohibition had we kept it going and just kept kicking it up a notch.
I am not at all for legalizing all drugs but we have got to start thinking of different approaches because this crap we are doing is never going to work and and the more we kick it up a notch the more we're going to turn into the kind of nation we don't want to be.