ABSTRACT
Next to the now-defunct Russian Revolution, Prohibition was the twentieth century's greatest social engineering project, suffering some of the same defects, but still alive despite a widely shared sense of basic failure. The Great Prohibition has shifted from alcohol to psychoactive drugs as the main substance controlled by penal sanction; users of both alcohol and drugs have been subjected to prohibition this century. After eighty years of governmental effort to enforce the Great Prohibition, prevention of drug use remains an unachieved and elusive goal. The main effect of Prohibition was to magnify the private problems of individual persons using alcohol or drugs. Prohibition created a large public domain devoted to restriction and punishment. I f Paul Johnson's Modern Times (1983) delivered a definitive call for freedom from the clutches of socialist and welfare state experiments at social engineering, Michael Woodiwiss delivers a similar critique to prohibitions in the United States, 1900-1987:
U.S. prohibition laws have not succeeded. Instead of solving the problems of excessive drinking, gambling and drug-taking, the laws themselves caused the devastation and termination of countless lives, exacerbated street crime, fostered successful organized crime, nullified or corrupted the law enforcement and criminal justice systems and reduced civil liberties. America's moral crusade has two faces. The rhetoric was righteous, but the reality only highlighted an unlimited capacity for lies, hypocrisy and illegal enrichment. The American people have been the victim of a successful double-cross. (1988:229)
The Great Prohibition did not succeed in controlling alcohol or drug use just as Communism did not succeed in controlling exploitation or economic failure. The difficulties in controlling use have been attributed to greed, to the corruption of authority, to the nature of addiction or dependency, to the role of alcohol or drugs in forming the basis for a way of life or "subculture" in modern society, or to the individual or collective quest for alteration of consciousness (Fingarette 1988; Weil 1972; Reinarman 1983). Whether because of the particular hold of especially demanding substances, or as simply a sign of popular products, effective demand for illegal drugs persists. The mark of the social engineering mentality is to imagine that the reason for failure has been an insufficient effort at law enforcement. Thus the failure in prohibition is thought by its proponents to require an ever greater and greater enforcement.
