College Presidents: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"
Katherine Mangu-Ward | August 19, 2008, 10:27am
College presidents from Duke, Dartmouth, Ohio State, and dozens of other schools are exhausted. They've tried pretty much everything they can think of to keep 18 to 20-year-olds from having a beer (or 10). It's not working, it's never going to work, and they're petitioning for a change.
The Amethyst Initiative (so called because the Greeks believed the stones could ward off drunkenness) is a pretty cool idea. Here are a bunch of sober (figuratively), unimpeachably serious people who have issued an interesting and well-thought-out declaration about how screwed up their campuses are, in part thanks to a foolishly high drinking age:
A culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.
Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.
Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.
By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.
They also make an explicit reference to the days of Dry Law, asking: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"
I'm especially keen on this point about eroding respect for the law. One of the first things that many teenagers do to prepare for college is get a fake ID. Congrats
highway fund "incentive," you've turned us all into scofflaws before we even get started on adulthood.
me | August 20, 2008, 2:08pm | #
With regards to "Learning the Lessons of Prohibition"
It is amazing how many of you just don't get it. The lesson WAS learned, and it sunk in deep and hard and will likely never be forgotten. It's just not the lesson you are thinking about.
The real lesson was that prohibition is the true path to real power. The kind of "knock on the door in the middle of the night" power that was forbidden to the government by the people in the drafting of the constitution. It's the kind of power you only get when you declare a war. It's no holds barred, must win at all costs time.
This lesson, learned by the people who desired real power, constitutionally prohibited power, has been refined and applied again and again. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism. It's all the same rhetoric, for the same reason. Once war has been declared the people have been conditioned to accept that the constitution and the people rights and freedoms have to give way in the quest for victory.
The war against booze showed the way. It was repealed because it almost lead to the downfall of the government. It was too good to just let go of, after all, there were so many true believers in support of it, and so incremental restrictions took its place.
The true lessons it taught, however, have been applied time and again. We now have wars that can never be won, and will never end. No amount of reasoning or logic will ever end the war on drugs, for example. It has proven to be the most successful path to power ever invented to convince a once independent people to tolerate the creation of a police state. It is so successful that governments all over the world, ever disdainful of the American way in so many other things, have all chosen to emulate it. The people who desire and hold this kind of power will never willingly give it up. Just listen to any of our "Top Cops" or "Drug Czars” trying to justify it. In between the lines they all say the same thing, "we don't care what you think, and we are not giving it up."
Being able to enact and then enforce unreasonable, arbitrary laws without any true restraint, bound to no rules except those fashioned by themselves, answerable only to themselves or people appointed by themselves, this is the very essence of power.
Good luck trying to change any of that.
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