Posted on 08/12/2003 12:47:25 PM PDT by freepatriot32
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Shaughn Butts, The Journal / Followers look on as Marc Emery smokes up Sunday.
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EDMONTON - Wearing a conservative blue suit, B.C. marijuana activist Marc Emery lit up a water pipe in front of Edmonton police headquarters Sunday afternoon and was promptly arrested. The leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party contends poss ession laws no longer exist because of recent Ontario court decisions. Before lighting up, Emery said the fact that people can be political and take action makes Canada "the greatest place on Earth." Two Edmonton police constables stepped into the crowd and led Emery inside, to a chorus of boos and jeers from about three dozen supporters who decried the arrest as unconstitutional. Federal Crown prosecutors have told Edmonton police that laws prohibiting marijuana possession are still in effect, said Insp. Dick Shantz. Officers charged Emery with a single count of pot possession. Police also tried to stop Emery's campaign by asking that a Canadawide ban preventing him from going to police stations unless he has a legitimate complaint be made one condition of his release. "We're getting tired of dealing with him," Shantz said. "He's tying up our manpower with his illegal crusade and we're not going to put up with it." Others were also smoking marijuana but Shantz said no one else was arrested because police did not have the manpower. Emery, publisher of the magazine Cannabis Culture, was arrested in Calgary on Saturday. He was earlier arrested in Winnipeg, Regina, Moncton, N.B., and St. John's, Nfld. He was not arrested at stops this summer in Toronto and Charolettetown, P.E.I. dpenner@thejournal.canwest.com |
Maybe you need to think this one out.
You claim “alcohol prohibition wasn't working" is a myth therefore alcohol prohibition must have been successfully working (in your mind) - that would make it a success (based on your logic). Your only point of argument would the word "great"
Your statements are not very well thought out - you shoot from the hip.
Alcohol prohibition is was dismal failure just as marijuana prohibition is a dismal failure.
So when you claimed you were making intelligent points, that was pure sarcasm. Now I understand.
Thousands of gangsters and crooked politicians, judges, and cops were doing 'swell', in the slang of the era.
Prohibition, like slavery, is an historical scandal for America. So is the WOD.
Deal with it.
One again THINK!!!!! If prohibition wasn’t “wasn’t working” then it ipso facto was successfully working.
BTW: while alcohol consumption did go down during prohibition in the beginning, near the end alcohol use began to increase as the illegal channels became more efficient. Prohibition made crime increase dramatically and it empowered organized crime. Americans disagreed with the law because it wasn’t working and they wanted to drink. I have seen no source of credible information that claims prohibition worked.
You are the one trying to tie the end of Prohibition to its success/failure. Unfortunately, that's not the way it happened.
In your mind only.
From the CATO Institute:
Alcohol Prohibition Was A Failure
by Mark Thornton (Mark Thornton is the O. P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at Auburn University.)
National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)--the "noble experiment"--was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure
I will take the CATO Institute and an Auburn University Professor over “presidio9 says so”
Now presidio9 claims to be able to see into the future.
This is the link to "Alcohol Prohibition was a Failure" on the CATO Institute website:
can you please provide a source for this?
thanks in advance
Just like the poison alcohol is legal---because banning it failed miserably, just as the War On Some Drugs is failing.
'Republican opponents of the law, headed by Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, James Wadsworth, and Henry Curran, urged the platform committee to admit the failure of the Eighteenth Amendment. "We ask this not only for the practical reason that Federal prohibition, after eight years of trial, is doing more and more harm and less and less good-that it just doesn't work -which is a fact that you and I and everybody else knows," said AAPA president Curran. "Our plea rests on higher ground than that. It goes far beyond all questions of liquor traffic. It rests on the safety of the Constitution itself." He explained, "The introduction of this solitary sumptuary statute into our Constitution has already nullified the very spirit of that well-tried instrument. The prohibition amendment is more than a meddling barnacle on the framework of our ship of state. It is a direct puncture in the sound hull of local self-government by our local sovereign states."'
'[...] The Anti-Saloon League, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and lesser groups made their standard dry or wet arguments. Grayson Murphy made a statement typical of the nearly two dozen AAPA officers and directors who spoke: "In the first place, the eighteenth amendment is absolutely contrary to the spirit of the rest of the Constitution.... [This] has led to all sorts of government acts which are contrary to the spirit of the Constitution ... [and] more crime, more corruption, more hypocrisy than any other law or set of sumptuary laws I have ever heard of in the world."" One of the few fresh approaches came from AAPA research director John Gebhart, who presented an impressive array of evidence on the evil effects of prohibition. He documented increases of drunkenness and crime since 1920, the adverse impact of prohibition on the legal and penal system, and the economic burdens of the law. Gebhart revealed a new study showing rises in both alcohol consumption and liquor prices since 1920. Prohibition had not stopped drinking, Gebhart concluded; it only increased costs to consumers and diverted profits into the hands of criminals." [...]
'[...]in 1929 an independent and effective women's repeal organization, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, appeared to challenge old assumptions.
'The spirit propelling this organization was Pauline Morton Sabin of New York. [...] The ineffectiveness of the law, the apparent decline of temperate drinking, and the growing prestige of bootleggers troubled her even more. Mothers, she explained, had believed that prohibition would eliminate the temptation of drinking from their children's lives, but found instead that "children are growing up with a total lack of respect for the Constitution and for the law.""
'In later statements, she elaborated further on her objections to prohibition. With settlement workers reporting increasing drunkenness, she worried, "The young see the law broken at home and upon the street. Can we expect them to be lawful?"" Mrs. Sabin complained to the House Judiciary Committee: "In preprohibition days, mothers had little fear in regard to the saloon as far as their children were concerned. A saloon-keeper's license was revoked if he were caught selling liquor to minors. Today in any speakeasy in the United States you can find boys and girls in their teens drinking liquor, and this situation has become so acute that the mothers of the country feel something must be done to protect their children."" Finally, she opposed federal involvement in matters of personal conduct." National prohibition, in sum, seemed to Pauline Sabin to be undermining American youth, the orderly, law-observing habits of society, and the principles of personal liberty and decentralized government, all important elements in the world of this conservative, upper-class, politically active woman.'
- Repealing National Prohibition, by David Kyvig, Copyright 1979 by the University of Chicago
"A recent study by Columbia University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, states that the earlier children use the gateway drugs tobacco or alcohol[...], the more likely they are to move on to other drugs. Youth who drank alcohol were 50 times more likely to use cocaine, and those who smoked tobacco cigarettes were 19 times as likely to use cocaine." - Drug Watch International Position Statement
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