Classical Values :: A Hearty Appetite

December 24, 2008

A Hearty Appetite

Suzanne Willis sent me this e-mail. She was responding to something she read in the Dallas Morning News.

If, as Mr. Schram says, drug violence is due to Americans' appetite for drugs, drug violence would have begun when Americans began using drugs. It didn't.

Americans have used cocaine, morphine and marijuana since the first Europeans arrived on the continent. For most of our country's history, distribution and use were quite peaceful.

In 1900 any man, woman or child could walk into a drug store and buy all of these drugs. Bayer Heroin cost the same as Bayer Aspirin. There are no records of "drug crimes" until after 1914 when the Harrison Narcotics Act, one of the first major laws restricting drug distribution, was passed.

The Harrison Narcotics Act was championed by the Temperance Movement and vigorously opposed by the medical community. Law enforcement was silent. Drug distribution had never been a law enforcement issue.

On May 15, 1915 , an editorial in the New York Medical Journal declared:
"The really serious results of this legislation...will only appear gradually.... These will be the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes...and the influx into hospitals for the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives."

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I don't think cocaine and morphine came into existence until extracting them from plant material was possible. Morphine in 1803. Cocaine in 1855. But still, the general principle is right. And what do you know? Even in 1915 it was recognized that such plant extracts could help with mental disorders. Something I have only been saying for about 7 or 8 years. Boy, am I ever behind the times. Of course those were simpler times. People thought that they had a right to choose their own medicines. Now a days the medical cartel has taken away most personal choice in the matter. Fur da grater god do val.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

posted by Simon on 12.24.08 at 02:56 PM

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Comments

She may be confusing morphine and opium / poppy juice, both of which were known.

SDN · December 24, 2008 11:31 PM

Taking recreational drugs was safer for those involved, and those around those involved, before automobiles came around.

If you fell off your horse drunk or high, only you were injured. At worst you drove your horse or buggy into a ditch, killing yourself, your horse, and your buggy.

Now you can plow through a crowd in your SUV and kill dozens, or cause hundreds of cars to pile up on the freeway, due to your intoxication.

If there could be devised a way to keep intoxicated persons from driving, it would reduce problems with intoxication. Heck, it could be extended to bad drivers, and old folks with poor vision and no reflexes.

Then we could work on the problems caused when Daddy comes home drunk, or snorts a bit of crank at home, then beats the wife and kids for fun.

Yes, I am a killer of joy.

Mikee · December 29, 2008 08:44 PM

Mikee,

The problems of intoxication are worst with alcohol.

And alcohol is the only drug known to induce violence. I don't have the studies at hand but rates of violence with amphetamines are not above population averages. OTOH alcohol is known to increase rates of violence. According to a government study.

So are you proposing a return to alcohol prohibition?

The problem with so much about what people "know" about the effects of illegal drug is: it ain't so.

M. Simon · December 30, 2008 03:51 AM

Among the many unresolved questions regarding the determinants of violence is the role of prohibitions against drugs and alcohol. Conventional wisdom holds that consumption of these goods encourages violence and that prohibitions discourage such consumption; thus, prohibitions reduce violence. An alternative view, however, is that prohibitions create black markets, and in black markets participants use violence to resolve commercial disputes. Thus, prohibitions potentially increase violence. This paper examines the relation between prohibitions and violence using the historical behavior of the homicide rate in the United States. The results document that increases in enforcement of drug and alcohol prohibition have been associated with increases in the homicide rate, and auxiliary evidence suggests this positive correlation reflects a causal effect of prohibition enforcement on homicide. Controlling for other potential determinants of the homicide rate -- the age composition of the population, the incarceration rate, economic conditions, gun availability, and the death penalty -- does not alter the conclusion that drug and alcohol prohibition have substantially raised the homicide rate in the United States over much of the past 100 years.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w6950

M. Simon · December 30, 2008 04:25 AM

Contrary to conventional wisdom and popular myth, alcohol is more tightly linked with more violent crimes than crack, cocaine, heroin or any other illegal drug. In state prisons, 21 percent of inmates in prison for violent crimes were under the influence of alcohol--and no other substance--when they committed their crime; in contrast, at the time of their crimes, only three percent of violent offenders were under the influence of cocaine or crack alone, only one percent under the influence of heroin alone.

http://www.casacolumbia.org/absolutenm/articlefiles/379-Behind%20Bars.pdf

M. Simon · December 30, 2008 04:41 AM