Behind The Neo-Prohibition Campaign

The Center for Consumer Freedom ^ | April 17, 2003 | Dan Mindus

[WaterDragon]

America’s anti-alcohol movement is composed of dozens of overlapping community groups, research institutions, and advocacy organizations, but they are brought together and given direction by one entity: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the RWJF has spent more than $265 million between 1997 and 2002 to tax, vilify, and restrict access to alcoholic beverages. Nearly every study disparaging alcohol in the mass media, every legislative push to limit marketing or increase taxes, and every supposedly “grassroots” anti-alcohol movement was conceived and coordinated at the RWJF’s headquarters. Thanks to this one foundation, the U.S. anti-alcohol movement speaks with one voice.

For the RWJF, it is an article of faith that diminishing per capita consumption across the board can contain the social consequences of alcohol abuse. Therefore, it has engaged in a long-term war to reduce overall drinking by all Americans. The RWJF relentlessly audits its own programs, checking to see if each dollar spent is having the maximum impact on reducing per capita consumption. Over the past 10 years, this blueprint has been refined. Increased taxes, omnipresent roadblocks, and a near total elimination of alcohol marketing are just a few of the tactics the RWJF now employs in its so-called “environmental” approach.

The environmental approach seeks to shift blame from the alcohol abuser to society in general (and to alcohol providers in particular). So the RWJF has turned providers into public enemy number one, burdening them with restrictions and taxes to make their business as difficult and complex as possible. The environmental approach’s message to typical consumers, meanwhile, is that drinking is abnormal and unacceptable. The RWJF seeks to marginalize drinking by driving it underground, away from mainstream culture and public places.

The RWJF funds programs that focus on every conceivable target, at every level from local community groups to state and federal legislation. Every demographic group is targeted: women, children, the middle class, business managers, Hispanics, Blacks, Whites, Native Americans. Every legal means is used: taxation, regulation, litigation. Every PR tactic: grassroots advocacy, paid advertising, press warfare. Every conceivable location: college campuses, sporting events, restaurants, cultural activities, inner cities, residential neighborhoods, and even bars.

The RWJF scored a major victory in 2000 with a federal .08 BAC mandate, and can claim credit for restrictions on alcohol in localities all over the country. But its $265 million has accomplished much more: it has put in place all the elements required for more sweeping change. This includes a vast network of local community organizations, centers for technical support, a compliant press, and a growing body of academic literature critical of even moderate alcohol consumption. The next highly publicized study or angry local movement may now reach the “tipping point” where the RWJF-funded anti-alcohol agenda snowballs into the kind of orchestrated frenzy the tobacco industry knows well.

Click HERE for the complete article.

[robertpaulsen]

"Might I humbly suggest you take a look at some homosexuality and/or abortion threads here on FR."

With respect, FR represents only a portion, a conservative portion, of society in general.

[robertpaulsen]

"You are the perfect example of... utterly insufferable arrogance."

Aw shucks, but c'mon -- nobody's perfect.

Wouldn't you rather have the straightforward truth rather than some pussy statement like, "I believe in the pursuit of happiness"?

These pro-legalization posters need to get some cojones and tell it like it is.

[ThinkDifferent]

Libertarian Party defends Joycelyn Elders' call to study drug legalization

News flash: whatever your opinion on the WOD you're going to be in less than distinguished company. Your allies include Bill Clinton and the UN.

[headsonpikes]

RE: 'Native American Totalitarians'

By 'Native', I mean autochthonous to America, as opposed to imported crap such as Marxism and various Frenchified.

De Tocqueville discusses the roots of these native tendencies in the various social contexts of early 19th C. America.

He feared that the urge to social conformism he found so abundant, particularly among women, could lead to a most illiberal society. I think he was right.

American 'Progressivism', whose noblest achievement was Prohibition was, in fact, the very model for Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler to follow in their futile attempts to become the most modern progressive states on the planet.

A Socialist Totalitarianism whose heros are Roosevelt and Anslinger is more to be feared by Americans than any weird little sect trumpeting Trotsky.

Prohibitionism is just one glaring aspect of that perennial disturbing utopian thread in American history.

But hey, cinFLA, you can just pretend the problem is furriners.

Furriners and heretics.

[jmc813]

Point taken. Maybe a better example would be racists e.g. the Klan, skinheads, etc.

[headsonpikes]

"...various Frenchified hallucinologies."

The phone rang. ;^)

[dcwusmc]

I respectfully request that this and all similar threads be allowed to remain where they are originally posted (usually News/Activism) so that ANY LURKER can see who comes in and starts flinging flame-bait. I must say it seems to be a coordinated effort to get these threads moved out of general public view and into the back room where they become "invisible" to the average reader. This is shameful, as there is usually a LOT of factual, valid and informative material posted. This material deserves to see the light of day because it exposes the excesses of Government and its allies in repressing the possession and use of INANIMATE and once-legal substances without benefit of a lick of constitutionality. Since the named purpose of FR is to see the CONSTITUTION restored to its rightful place as SUPREME law of the land, anything which exposes Constitutionally-infirm misdeeds of ANY level of government on ANY topic... drug laws, gun-grabbing laws, environmental laws, and so forth, MUST be free to be discussed OPENLY. I know JimRob hates drugs; many of us do, as well... but the evils perpetrated by the drug WAR (The War on AMERICANS, in the NAME of drugs) MUST be loudly and publicly exposed. Just as violations of the First amendment, the SECOND amendment and so forth, must be proclaimed loudly and often in order to bring our Federal Monster back into its chains.

So I request that the flame-bait, troll brigade not be allowed to succeed in getting these threads moved back into the back room. Thanks.

[tacticalogic]

FWIW, I'm going to apologize to you for any feed of the trolls I did on this thread. I think the issue is important, and the thread didn't deserve to get side-tracked like it did.

[robertpaulsen]

I don't deny that social ostracism exists today, I just don't see a coherent pattern. It used to be that social ostracism was reserved for immoral behavior, as a way to "enforce" societal norms. Things like out-of-wedlock pregnancy, cheating spouses, swearing, etc.

Nowadays, it's smoking, SUV's, etc. Without a pattern, it looks more like intolerance, don't you think?

[tacticalogic]

Nowadays, it's smoking, SUV's, etc. Without a pattern, it looks more like intolerance, don't you think?

I think it's still a "morality" issue, but the moral context is being shifted from the effect on the individual and immediate family to the effect on society.

[bassmaner]

Come out and say what you really mean. You would like to be accepted in society, but would also like to participate in selfish, irresponsible, and immoral behavior. Right?

No.

What I'm saying is that if I engage in any consensual behavior behind closed doors where no third party is harmed by it, I should not be subject to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration simply because a certain segment of the population finds that behavior selfish, irresponsible, and immoral.

Personally, I find the concept of the prohibitionist nanny state "selfish, irresponsible, and immoral" because it imposes its values on others at the point of a government gun. So much for the "pursuit of happiness".

[tpaine]

robertpaulsen
the pursuit of happiness [is]
"More like "the selfish and irresponsible pursuit of immoral behavior."
-rp-


See #11. -- You are the perfect example of:

---- "The utterly insufferable arrogance of power, and the need for it, is an absolute fact of the human condition. -- Nothing can be done about it. - Just as the poor shall always be with us, so shall we have these infinitely shrewd imbeciles who live to lay down their version of 'the law' to others."
58 by tpaine


Wouldn't you rather have the straightforward truth rather than some pussy statement like, "I believe in the pursuit of happiness"?
These pro-legalization posters need to get some cojones and tell it like it is.
62 -rp-


Don't confuse your ability to delude yourself about "straightforward truth" with having cojones, bob.
You sure as hell haven't fooled anybody here at FR that I can see.

[robertpaulsen]

Pretty obvious that this consensual behavior didn't stay behind closed doors, otherwise we wouldn't be facing all of these new laws, would we? So you can stop with the "behind closed doors" argument, because it won't wash.

Also, this "certain segment" you mentioned happens to be the majority of the population. We live here, too. And we should also have a say in how we are going to live and constructing an environment that's best for raising the next generation.

Allow me to quote: "Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease."
-- Thomas Jefferson

[MrLeRoy]

Pretty obvious that this consensual behavior didn't stay behind closed doors, otherwise we wouldn't be facing all of these new laws

Far from obvious. Can you present an actual argument for your claim?

[tacticalogic]

this consensual behavior didn't stay behind closed doors

Nothing stays "behind closed doors" in the face of a battering ram.

[bassmaner]

Also, this "certain segment" you mentioned happens to be the majority of the population.

I doubt very much that a majority of the population would ever favor re-enacting alcohol prohibition (the major point of the article). But individual liberty should never be trumped by mob rule, anyway. Hey, at one time the majority of the population favored discriminatory Jim Crow legislation against blacks - did that make it right?

No one denies the fact that societies need certain rules to function and keep from desending into anarchy. But, lets face it - not everything is absolute. Sure, there are some things: you harm me or my family and you're committing an absolutely evil act. But why is me smoking a joint in my home (or drinking a beer, for that matter) an absolutely evil act? How does such an act have any effect on society at large? And why should society threaten me with criminal sanctions, just because some bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger decided in the 1930's that I was committing an evil act by ingesting a substance that was an accepted part of the physician's pharmacopiea for thousands of years prior?

I simply just cannot accept the premise of prohibition. It doesn't work, it's counterproductive, and it's just plain wrong .

[robertpaulsen]

Can I present an actual argument for my claim that drug use, homosexual behavior, prostitution, gambling, and pornography haven't stayed "behind closed doors"?

I don't know. I suppose I could argue, "OPEN YOUR EYES", but hey, what kind of argument is that?

[cinFLA]

The Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, a project of the Open Society Institute, funds projects to achieve public safety solutions through sentencing reform and by reducing both gun violence and excessive incarceration. The Open Society Institute is a nonprofit grantmaking foundation created by George Soros. The Funders’ Collaborative for Gun Violence Prevention consists of OSI, the Irene Diamond Fund and other funders working together to reduce and prevent the harm caused by excessive availibility of guns.

[cinFLA]

Let's see who the libertarian druggies have trotted out:

Sam Farr, J. Elders, Ed Rosenthal, Al Gore

I stand with GWB.

[bassmaner]

The Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, a project of the Open Society Institute, funds projects to achieve public safety solutions through sentencing reform and by reducing both gun violence and excessive incarceration. The Open Society Institute is a nonprofit grantmaking foundation created by George Soros. The Funders’ Collaborative for Gun Violence Prevention consists of OSI, the Irene Diamond Fund and other funders working together to reduce and prevent the harm caused by excessive availibility of guns.

What's your point? Why do drug warrior nanny staters like you and Dane have such an obsession with George Soros? And what does it have to do with the article?