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Remember: anti-drug, anti-tobacco, and anti-alcohol laws were all the product of PROGRESSIVES agitating for social engineering policies.

They all heavily involved ethnic stereotyping and race-baiting to motivate public support.

Their crusade against chewing tobacco and filthy spittoons led to an increase in cigar smoking. Their legislation against the evils of cigar smoking and careful legal definitions about what constituted a cigar led to the development of a product that bypassed those definitions: it was called the “little cigar,” better known as the cigarette. And we know how that turned out.

Their attacks on the drinking of alcoholic beverages, at a time when US per capita consumption was already quickly and spontaneously dropping before they ever got on the bandwagon, led to two great evils:

1) The progressives knew that with prohibition the federal government would lose its principal source of revenue, so they led the push for the income tax. They probably saw that per capita alcohol consumption was plummeting and knew that decreasing federal revenue would mean an increasingly poor federal government that, once they gained control, would not have the funds needed to enact the rest of their agenda.

2) At the time there were city by city crime syndicates. Within each city there were fierce battles between rival syndicates for control of territory as well as control of the city government. But the nationwide prohibition on the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages created the condition for organized crime on an national and international scope. Shortly after prohibition was made law, representatives from the various city crime syndicates met to work out a plan for cooperation in the importing, distribution, and sales of a formerly legal but still greatly desired product.

Thanks to the progressives and their desire to control the appetites of the public to enact their own vision of the perfect society, we got the twin scourges of skyrocketing federal taxation of all kinds enforced by the IRS that was the legal mirror image of the mob and organized international crime that exchanged rum-runners for narco-traficantes and all the subsidiary crime that came with it, including pleas for ever-increasing levels of federal efforts to combat a problem entirely of its own creation, and the creation of asset-forfeiture laws that have led to extreme abuse of the public they were meant to protect by giving law enforcement the means to seize money and property on the flimsiest of excuses and in the absence of any crime and to retain it with no conviction of their victims with the help of a separate asset forfeiture court system that almost always sides with the cops and lets them keep the rewards of their privateering.

Before these progressive-sponsored anti-substance laws were passed, there were people who used the various substances, but there were no widespread epidemics of crime caused by their use.

But now, thanks to the progressives, we have what we always had PLUS a massive federal government, oppressive regulations and punitive taxes, highly organized international crime syndicates, and all the crime that all those things have brought.

Thanks for worse than NOTHING, progressives.