Why Did Prohibition Require a Constitutional Amendment?

[Maceman]

I have been wondering lately how come the US Government needed a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but did not need one to outlaw marijuana and other drugs.

Can any scholarly Freepers explain this to me? As always, your briliant insights, cogent reasoning, encyclopedic historical knowledge and smart-assed remarks wlil be eagerly appreciated.

[tacticalogic]

Under the reasoning of the Supreme Court in the case in which it upheld the Harrison Act, United States v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 (1919), it would be constitutional to impose a prohibitive tax on ammunition:

I believe this reasoning was reversed in 1969, when the Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstituional.

[varon]

I believe it's in the BECAUSE WE SAY SO Clause....

ROFLMAO

[aristeides]

I was not aware the Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional. Can you provide a citation to the case?

[tacticalogic]

Not off the top of my head, but I'll do a search and get back to you. I remember after it was declared unconstitutional the DEA got some kind of waiver to keep enforcing prohitition until the Controlled Substances Act was written and passed.

[tacticalogic]

I did a quick search and found what looks like it here.

[Fintan]

So what you're saying is that our government was and still is corrupt, bullying, thoughtless, and power hungry?

Might be why we're here.

[SR71A]

The first law against cannabis was the Tax Stamp scam, 1937. You could grow it if you paid for the stamp.

One of the first to try applied for the stamp and was told he couldn't get the stamp until he had his crop grown. He grew it, came back in the fall for his stamp, and they threw him in jail for 4 years for growing it without the stamp. Anslinger made Hoover look human by comparison.

The amusing part about the tax act is that they had to give waivers to farmers to grow hemp during WWII when normal hemp supplies from the Phillipines were cut off.

[aristeides]

Thanks. That's the Timothy Leary case. If I understand it correctly, it holds that the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutionally violates the Fifth Amendment because it forces persons to admit that they possess marijuana in violation of state and federal criminal statutes. In the absence of such criminal statutes, an act that merely imposes a prohibitive tax would not be unconstitutional. And that is what the Supreme Court held in Doremus.

[Database]

tacticalogic says

I don't know how well it would "play", but I thing the case can be made that the Second Amendment is an exception. The phrase "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" could be read as disqualifying any attempt at repeal. The amendment to repeal would be unconstitutional from the outset.

While I'd like to believe in exceptions, I find it hard to agree. But, you got me to thinking and I'd even go so far as to say that the Article V prohibition regarding suffrage could be changed by ammendment; first to remove the equal suffrage limitation in regard to ammendments, and second to make whatever change in the senate which would result in non-equal suffrage. This is all on a legal level, rather than the spirit/original intent level.

raygun says

There is no spirit to the Constitution, it is a fallacy espoused by liberals that it is the spirit should be interpreted as oppossed to the letter of the law.

While I suppose I agree that there is no spirit to the Constitution, there is a philosophical underpinning (spirit or original intent) from which the Constitution was born. That spirit resided in the people and was reflected in the Constitution. The spirit in the people (in general) today is not the same as that which the founding generation possessed, which has been taken advantage of by politicians to grow governmental power and erode natural rights. Each generation will interpret the Constitution, or mold it, according to the spirit of the time.

So, there is some truth in what liberals would call the "spirit" of the Constitution, but the fallacy is in considering the new spirit as better than the original. They wrap the new spirit up in the word "progress." The original spirit, with great understanding and foresight, would view this as the natural progression of government, especially that of a government dominated by democracy.

Returning to FreeTally's original assertion that ammending the bill of rights is tantamount to a declaration of war, it depends on the spirit of the people. If there is enough original spirit remaining to mount a significant response to any such attempt, then it will be so. If not, then it will just be "progress."

[O Neill]

Thanks. That's the Timothy Leary case.

You're right! My thanks to 'tactilogic' for finding it as well. Oh, sweet nostalgia....

I believe THAT's the case in which Timothy Leary was arrested at his 'pad' by a team of FBI agents, one of which was G. Gordon Liddy (who later masterminded Operation Gemstone and the Watergate burglary for the Nixon Team). Liddy describes that arrest in his own book, 'Will'. According to Liddy, the FBI team arrived at Leary's 'pad' and Leary's live-in girlfriend answered the door quite scantily clad. Leary came down the stairs clad only in a short T-shirt, his manhood dangling and swaying visably in the musty and foul-smelling air. The foul odor was to expected, of course, since Liddy had noticed the carpets were everywhere covered with feces...the size of the various turds approximating that of human dung.

Oh yes...'how did it go Dr. Leary?...'drop-out...tune-in....turn-on'....? Something like that. Grooooooovy, man! There's HOPE for DOPE! Yessir....

[metesky]

Hoo due ya tink ya be?

[tacticalogic]

Okay. I guess they could do the same with ammunition or reloading supplies. They might be able to enforce a tax on ammunition, gunpowder or primers, but I'd hate to think what would be involved in trying to enforce a tax on brass and lead.

[Ken H]

The 17th Amendment, which changed the method of choosing Senators, altered Article I, Section 3.

Much to our detriment.

[tacticalogic]

But, you got me to thinking

Good. That's one of my favorite things to do, wheather you end up agreeing with me or not.

[metesky]

Strunk's Elements of Style

[justlurking]

I've heard persistent stories over the years that a lot of law enforcement types started to carry .38 and .45 caliber pistols thanks to a pervasive belief that .32 caliber pistols wouldn't be able to stop an assailant that was under the influence of cocaine.

Almost any handgun is underpowered. It's a tradeoff to find something that you can shoot (two-handed, strong-handed, and weak-handed), recover and shoot again.

The laws of physics say that a bullet cannot exert more force on your target than was exerted on your hand(s) when the shot was fired. So, a handgun bullet really doesn't have enough power to "knock someone down" without doing the same to the person that pulled the trigger.

Setting aside fragmentation and expansion (to avoid over-penetration), a bullet really isn't much more than the extension of a spear. The best you can hope for is sufficient internal injury to a vital organ to incapacitate someone quickly -- the central nervous system (brain, spine), circulatory (heart), or structural (pelvis).

There have been some studies that statistically analyze the use of particular calibers by police officers, but so many of them are confined to particular calibers on-duty that I'm not sure there is a sufficiently wide spread of samples to make a judgement.

[inquest]

Actually I wasn't referring to "moral liberal" sense, but to the fact that many of them tend to have that "do-gooder" streak to them. Of course there are excetptions (generally speaking - People who start their own businesses and become very successful at it: conservative.. People who have inherited 3rd-generation fortunes from birth: not conservative). Workers (real workers), on the other hand, tend not to be too sympathetic to welfare types.

The people who run the media are liberal but they ain't representive of the upper class.

Then what exactly are they representative of?

[aruanan]

how come

Otherwise known as "why".

[aruanan]

Prohibition didn't require a constitutional amendment. People used the constitutional amendment as a means of attempting to encase an ongoing prohibition movement (prohibition was already in 33 states before the Amendment went into effect, see 3rd paragraph below) in rebar and concrete, ie, trying to make it the American equivalent of the law of the Medes and Persians, one which, once passed, would be universal and, for all practical purposes, unalterable. Read the following for some insight both on the cause of Prohibition and steps taken along the way. Incidentally, it was this same movement that had tobacco or forms of tobacco outlawed in various states and that took the same stance against other drugs (note, the links go nowhere; see the original source for working links)

In the United States an early wave of movements for state and local prohibition arose out of the intensive religious revivalism of the 1820s and '30s, which stimulated movements toward perfectionism in human beings, including temperance and the abolition of slavery. The precedent for seeking temperance through law was set by a Massachusetts law, passed in 1838 and repealed two years later, which prohibited sales of spirits in less than 15-gallon quantities. The first state prohibition law was passed in Maine in 1846 and ushered in a wave of such state legislation before the Civil War.

The drive for national prohibition emerged out of a renewed attack on the sale of liquor in many states after 1906. The underlying forces at work to support national prohibition included antipathy to the growth of cities (the presumed scene of most drinking), evangelical Protestant middle-class anti-alien and anti-Roman Catholic sentiment, and rural domination of the state legislatures, without which ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment would have been impossible. Other forces included the corruption existing in the saloons and the industrial employers' increased concern for preventing accidents and increasing the efficiency of workers.

The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, led the state prohibition drives of 1906–13. During World War I a temporary Wartime Prohibition Act was passed to save grain for use as food. By January 1920 prohibition was already in effect in 33 states covering 63 percent of the total population. In 1917 the resolution for submission of the Prohibition Amendment to the states received the necessary two-thirds vote in Congress; the amendment was ratified on Jan. 29, 1919, and went into effect on Jan. 29, 1920. On Oct. 28, 1919, the National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act (after its promoter, Congressman Andrew J. Volstead), was enacted, providing enforcement guidelines. --Encyclopedia Britannica