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Lessons From The History Of Alcohol Control |
Author's note: The following essay is intended for use as the
final element of Part I. of A Comprehensive Public Health Strategy for Control of the Drug/Crime
Epidemic.In this position, this article will form a bridge linking the
preceding analysis of the drug/crime epidemic to the following
specification of that epidemic's remedy.
Donald C. Smart
April 5, 1997
Alcohol as a Dangerous Drug Alcohol is a dangerous drug and a major public health menace in
the United States and many other parts of the world. As for its
health detriments, Holder, Lennox and Blose (1992) report studies
showing that: U.S. drinkers use medical care at twice the rate
of non-drinker members of the same age and gender cohorts; drinkers
have shorter life expectancies and higher mortality rates; and
alcohol consumption increases a person's chances of illness and
early death from damaged liver, intestines, gastrological and
endocrine systems, heart, nervous, and respiratory systems, the
throat and esophagus, and from cancer. Still other studies show
that alcohol compromises the immune system and a wide range of
medicinal drugs. Beyond these hazards, drinkers suffer increased
risk of accidental injury to themselves and others from stupor,
distorted perception, impaired motor control and psychosis. The
associated social costs are enormous.
Since alcohol is widely acknowledged to do more harm than all
the illegal drugs combined, we might ask: why is it not illegal?
For the answer, we must look at the politics of alcohol policy
in the period of prohibition's repeal. By December of 1933, an
alcohol industry engorged on the super-profits of prohibition,
had managed to buy favorable portrayal of alcohol and the alcohol
culture in the news and entertainment media of the period and
to convince very large numbers of Americans that drinking was
better than the combined merits of abstinence and obedience to
the law. The drinkers were joined by those of the abstainers who
had learned the first lesson of alcohol history, and, together
with the industry and its beneficiaries, a coalition formed that
decisively out- numbered the prohibitionists. That is why this
dangerous drug is also legal (Kyvig, 1979).
The first lesson of alcohol history has been treated above: it
is that prohibition of alcohol - society's reflex reaction to
alcohol harm - instead of preventing alcohol harm, fertilized
the infamous gangsterism of the 1920's with super-profits from
the illegal traffic in bootlegged alcohol. The social, political
and economic mechanisms that drove the social pathologies of the
era of alcohol prohibition were very much the same as those that
drive today's drug/crime epidemic.
At this writing, we are six decades into the post-prohibition
era, a period with its own unique experience in the control of
alcohol. Let us examine now some of the major aspects of the experience
of this era with an eye out for lessons that may be applicable
to our contemporary problem of controlling harm from the presently
illegal drugs.
The State Monopoly System Several states of the United States and several foreign countries
currently operate governmentally- owned monopolies (so-called
"state monopolies") in the distribution of alcoholic beverages.
The declared rationale for creating these monopolies was to control
private enterprise in the distribution of alcohol and thereby
reduce consumption.