The Drug War and Police Brutality, Part One: Prohibition

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JULY 2016, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

Police are being killed by citizens. Citizens are being killed by police. The killings have become a weekly occurrence. Social media and cable news are inundated with daily tales of violence in the streets. Politicians and pundits pontificate on the causes and where the blame lies. Fingers are pointed in all directions. The people struggle to make sense of what seems like a descending cloud of chaos. Billionaire businessmen promise Law and Order and swift retribution for lawbreakers. Career politicians promise understanding and increased social justice. No one seems sure what the answers are, but all are sure that things are not as they ought to be. The words of William Butler Yeats ring in my ears like the decaying sound of a distant warning bell:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

How did we get here? Is there some rational explanation for all of this? Is it just random chaos and entropy, or is there a definable set of historical circumstances and decisions that led us inexorably to our current predicament?

I would answer in the affirmative: There is an historical explanation for the state of our nation today, a series of events which brought us to where we are now. In my new four-part series The War on Drugs and Police Brutality, I will endeavor to unfold this tale and examine its ramifications for today. The story begins in 1919, the very year that Yeats penned his famous apocalyptic words...



The War on Drugs and Police Brutality, Part One: The Prohibition Era

In 1919, the United States ratified the most important piece of prohibition legislation in our history: The 18th Amendment to the Constitution. The 18th Amendment banned the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States" and gave Congress the power to "enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The complete history of the temperance movement and the complete history of how Prohibition was a complete disaster are subjects that are outside the scope of this post, as entire books have been written about each. What I would like to do here is to address several important points about the 18th Amendment which are relevant to the overall discussion of drug prohibition and its effects on communities and police tactics.

• It was generally recognized at the time that the Constitution as it stood granted no authority to the Federal government to enact prohibition.
• Previous pieces of legislation aimed at curbing the use of drugs and/or alcohol, such as the Harrison Act of 1914, had been passed as ostensible efforts to tax and regulate legal activity under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. It was only after the Constitution was amended that the Volstead Act, which actually defined the "intoxicating liquors" banned by the 18th Amendment, could then be passed.
• Even with the Eighteenth Amendment, it was recognized that the Federal government only had the authority to regulate commercial activity related to alcohol, i.e. transport, sale and manufacture; consumption and manufacture for personal use was NOT outlawed. 
• Personal consumption could not in any way be construed as commerce, and thus its prohibition could not be justified by the invocation of the Commerce Clause.
• However,  the Volstead Act effectively outlawed personal use by placing the burden of proof on the accused, thus denying U.S. citizens the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
• The act specifically stated that the "burden of proof shall be upon the possessor in any action concerning the same to prove that such liquor was lawfully acquired, possessed, and used.” Thus the first act of outright prohibition at the Federal level was also the opening salvo in the war on the American people's civil liberties (in this case, a jurisprudential concept with over six centuries of history behind it, and one of the pillars of modern Western civilization...)
• The police power of the Federal government was greatly expanded during Prohibition. 
• Under previous laws passed to regulate alcohol and drugs, enforcement had been left to the states. In fact, the Federal government had little enforcement infrastructure in place, as police power was left to the states by the Tenth Amendment.
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been founded under the auspices of the Justice Department in 1908 with a whopping ten agents. (At that time, there were very few Federal crimes in need of policing.) In 1920, the Bureau of Prohibition alone employed over fifteen hundred agents. (As of 2008, there were over 120,000 Federal law enforcement officers.)
• Hoover's Bureau made extensive use of warrantless wiretaps to combat bootleggers.
• The enforcement of the Volstead Act was largely left to the Treasury Department and the revenue officers of the Internal Revenue Service, who were given the broad authority not only to regulate, but also to investigate violations. The Bureau of Prohibition (which would later become the ATF) was established for this purpose.
• Prohibition agents were notoriously corrupt, and were viewed by the public as callously endangering the lives of civilians in gunfights with suspected criminals.
• The ATF would later be involved in several well-known scandals, including the murder of women and children by agents of the Federal government at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and their tactics in enforcing firearms legislation would be criticized by a Senate subcommittee as "constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible."
• Although the Temperance Movement's great triumph in enacting Prohibition began with altruistic motives, the government quickly turned it from a campaign of protection to one of draconian punishment.
• Prohibition failed to curtail drinking. According to some estimates, alcoholism increased by over three hundred percent in the 1920's; by the end of the decade there were 30,000 speakeasies in New York City alone.
• After the enactment of Prohibition, bootleggers turned to industrial alcohols as a supply for cheap booze, re-distilling it to make it drinkable. 
• In 1926, the government began forcing the manufacturers of industrial alcohols to add ever more poisonous chemicals to their products, such as gasoline, kerosene, formaldehyde, quinine, and methyl alcohol.
• In 1926, New York city saw 1,200 people sickened and 400 killed by poisoned alcohol, prompting chief medical examiner Charles Norris to refer to the poisoning program as "our national experiment in extermination."
• By the end of Prohibition in 1933, as many as ten thousand people had been killed by intentionally-poisoned alcohol, most of them poor people who couldn't afford the high-end spirits available to wealthy drinkers.

Bottom Line: Prohibition was the beginning of the sad state of affairs in America today: the expansion of government power; the degradation of civil liberties; predatory police tactics which view citizens as enemies to be defeated and/or sources of revenue to be exploited; increased street violence associated with the trafficking of banned substances; increased mistrust in law enforcement officials; and open hostility between the people and the police. In this sense, the war against alcohol was a precursor to the War on Drugs in every way except one: people realized relatively quickly that it was a mistake.

Up Next: The Drug War and Police Brutality, Part Two: Mister Nixon's War