123 years ago today, alcohol prohibition in the United States began. With the ratification of the 18th amendment, the manufacture, importation, or sale of intoxicating beverages became illegal. The noble experiment didn’t last; prohibition ended in 1933 as part of New Deal, and control of the liquor industry was turned over to the individual states.
Mohandas Gandhi had many good qualities, and he's inspired me and millions of others to be better. As I've walked along the path of self-improvement, his writings in hand, I have taken comfort in the fact that Gandhi didn't drink. I took joy in discovering that, in some of his earliest political writings at the ripe old age of 21, Gandhi called out the British Government for promoting and profiting from the sale of alcohol in India. Or, as Gandhi referred to it, “that enemy of mankind, that curse of civilization.”
There's a fair amount of evidence that he was right, especially as far as the United States is concerned. Alcohol costs hundreds of billions in lost productivity, it's involved in an estimated 300,000 violent crimes each year; it kills more than 140,000 people too. Put another way; take five school buses loaded with children and drive them off a cliff. Do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day... and at the end of the year you'd still be about 10,000 bodies shy of killing as many people as alcohol does in America alone.
Gandhi got it. Voluntarily abstaining from alcohol was a virtue that he preached throughout his life, or as he wrote in his newspaper, Indian Opinion, “The man who stops drinking under compulsion by law, and not as a matter of duty, cannot be called a virtuous man. It is the man who of his own free will avoids drinking that is really virtuous.” This was even one of the themes of the Salt March.
Six years ago, coincidently on Prohibition Day, I got drunk to close the door on years of heavy drinking. After about four months into a one year experiment of sobriety, Annie Grace's book This Naked Mind had unexpectedly reshaped the way I viewed alcohol. Now I could see what Gandhi meant when he called it a “pollutant.” Armed with Ray Kroc's favorite whiskey, I set out to get drunk alone one last time...
The next morning dawned like many before it had; waking where I'd passed out on the couch, playing that old familiar game of “what's the last thing I can remember?” Lights were on all over the house, half eaten food was on the table, and I had no idea where my glasses were. It's a good memory of how disorienting alcohol really is.
Of course, it wasn't as nearly as disorienting as when, in my fourth or fifth biography of Gandhi, I turned a page to find a picture of him with the caption, “Gandhi in 1922, on a campaign for alcohol prohibition.” More on that tomorrow…
What moral difference do you see, if any, between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition?