We like to listen to audiobooks and Teaching Company lectures on long driving trips. These days, on a recent trip to Arizona we were listening to Bill Bryson's One Summer: America 1927, a truly wonderful book that explores the REAL history of America, as opposed to the sanitized mythology we all learned in high school.
When he discussed prohibition at some length, I was struck by how similar the tale is to today's "War on Drugs". A valiant, high-minded but ultimately futile campaign that (a) hasn't reduced drug use, in fact has increased it massively, (b) produced well-funded smuggling cartels that now have incomes approaching that of small nations and violence approaching full-scale wars, and (c) produced a whole well-funded underground industry genetically engineering more potent marijuana plants and building new designer drugs. As a nation we apparently learned absolutely nothing from the disastrous and ultimately futile prohibition experiment. All we have to show for it thus far are overfilled jails and decades of massive federal and state expenditures that could have been better spent on education.
Thoughts and observations about the world condition.
See also the annotated book list on the sidebar at the right, as well as the YouTube Lecture list
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