Rethinking drug prohibition: Don't look for U.S. Government leadership

Abstract

Drug prohibition is today too important a tool for U.S. political institutions, and too critical an issue for certain economic interests, to expect that significant drug-law reform will be initiated in the United States. One certain indicator that reform in the U.S. is still remote is that it is rarely (if ever) suggested in political discourse, and only occasionally in the national media that current drug policy is a prohibition analogous in many important respects to America’s infamous ‘noble experiment’ of National Alcohol Prohibition. The fact that the U.S. has succeeded in foisting drug prohibition upon the entire world, whereas alcohol prohibition was rejected by most nations as absurd, has far more to do with traditions of intoxicant use and the post-WW2 superpower status of the U.S. than with any inherent legitimacy or proven effectiveness of prohibition as