Why would we assume the prohibition in the 1920s has any similarity to banning drugs in 1911? Alcohol has been with humanity for it's entire history, and it is an integral component in many cultures. It has been with humans so long that we evolved genes specifically to process it.
None of this history or physiology applies to drugs.
We don't need to assume it - we can observe it.
Alcohol [...] has been with humans so long that we evolved genes specifically to process it.
Only the minute amounts in overripe fruit. Whenever you drink alcohol and feel an effect - be it only 'relaxing' - that's your body being given more alcohol than it can process. Weak if any support there for alcohol-legal-pot-illegal.
Alcohol remains—hands down and by several orders of magnitude—the worst drug on the face of the earth. And yet the Prohibitionist Mind can't seem to grasp the abject hypocrisy which is required to maintain a legal distinction between the drug alcohol and the rest of them.
Arbitrary law—which is what is required in order to criminalize things—is inherently Tyrannical. Once the State is granted the power to imprison its citizens for possessing the wrong plant, chemical, medicine, etc., there is no practical limit to its power.
The same nanny-state rationalizations which the Left uses to justify things like banning smoking at restaurants—or the possession of high capacity magazines—are what the Right uses to ban plants and impose its authoritarian views on the People.
When it comes to manufacturing "crimes" to the point where a peaceable Individual becomes a criminal—simply for pursuing happiness according to his or her own conscience—and in the total absence of infringing on anyone else's rights—there's not a dime's worth of difference between authoritarians on the Right and the Left.
Anyone who calls themselves a "limited government conservative" while simultaneously believing that the State has the right to imprison its citizens for owning the wrong plant—doesn't even understand the nature of human freedom, much less "limited government". Government that is effectively unlimited in its ability to criminalize its citizens—with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen, mind you—isn't "limited government" by any stretch of the imagination.
I would argue it is as addictive and MORE destructive than pot. Not too many high wife beaters out there. Plenty of drunk ones though.