Most people don't think Prohibition was bad because it's a bad idea to outlaw a substance. They think it was bad because they don't think alcohol should be illegal. Similarly, while a majority of people now support legalization of marijuana, an overwhelming majority of people still support keeping cocaine and heroin illegal.

True. Most people aren't very good at abstract thinking.

That's not being bad at abstract thinking. That's thinking abstractly (and well), but just differently from you.

Yes, it's being bad at abstract thinking. There's not much that cocaine, heroin, or even meth can do to you that alcohol can't. It's indisputable that we've made poor decisions regarding what drugs to ban -- marijuana as a Schedule I drug? Really? -- and IMHO the reason for that goes back to the fact that we didn't have an appropriate basis for banning any of them in a supposedly-free society.

As other posters have suggested (and been duly modded down for it), prohibition isn't really about the drugs.

Is it really? The vast majority of Prohibition era issues were relatively substance independent, and given that we've seen the EXACT same public response, political/buzzword currents surrounding the pro-prohibition movements, and emergent criminal enterprise, I think it's fair to say that "prohibition of *" is a reasonable class to abstract by.

(Watching Ken Burns "Prohibition" is something I'd strongly recommend to just about anyone, not only is it a fantastic documentary as par for the course for Burns, but it was a steady stream of "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF" in such stark terms as you rarely see.)

I hope history doesn't look at the war on drugs as having anything at all to do with drugs. It was all about having a way to lock up blacks and hippies for reasons that seemed legit on paper. Drugs were ancillary. Then of course it morphed into a for-profit industry and is the clusterfuck we have today.

Yup it started out as Richard Nixon's war on the counterculture, imagine if Steve Jobs had been taken out in the war on drugs we'd all be stuck using windows 10 at work instead of having nice macbook pros lol.

I gained a different perspective from watching the Ken Burns Prohibition documentary

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/

Before I watched it I thought "how could people be so stupid as to think they would ever ban alcohol". After I watched it I was like "oh wow, people drank on average 1.5 bottles of hard alcohol a week? Drunks were everywhere? Opening a bar was super cheap because the alcohol companies subsidised them. Ok, maybe I get why people would vote for prohibition".

I'm not saying it was a good idea. It was clearly stupid idea which the rest of the doco made clear and is directly analogous to the war on drugs.

Another POV that gave me a new perspective was the idea that legal drugs (alcohol) kill way more people than the war on drugs kills. 3+ million a year die from alcohol. (http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en/). Legalizing a bunch more drugs may have the unintended consequences of killing an order of magnitude more people than the war on drugs.

I'm not saying I'm for the war on drugs. All the unintended consequences of that are horrible as well. The USA's police state, seizure laws, militarization, etc. But, the idea that we'll end up possibly causing 10x more death from legalization makes me wonder if there's some middle position

I do think it's important to consider what you mean when you say 'drugs'. Alcohol is not the same thing as weed, which is not the same thing as heroin. Putting all 'drugs' together in one category muddles up the conversation, and this is worsened by separating them into legal and illegal in ways that don't really make sense.

While I'm not necessarily all in favor of weed, for example, I'm convinced that legalizing it, simply because of its properties, will not lead to even a fraction of the deaths that legalized alcohol use does.

It's difficult to discuss any kind of position when we use a term as vague as 'drugs'.

It's about Liberty.

Trying to foresee all future consequences is pointless when you have no control over them anyway. Besides, how many lives have been destroyed by the War on Drugs? That requires second and third order reasoning, not simply a body count.

So, drugs legalization can be used as population control. Nothing wrong with that.