Banning something never works - it just
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After the tragic Charleston shooting last week, South Carolina’s governor demanded a ban on the Confederate flag shifting the national conversation from a very real confrontation of racism to a circus act focused on a relic of it—rather than the root cause. In the aftermath of the media frenzy, companies pulled the flag from their shelves and prohibitionists set their sights on a memorial to slave-owner Thomas Jefferson in Washington D.C..
While the intentions of outright banning symbols, statues, or behavior are usually always good—desires to end racism, hate, or destructive behavior, for example—the mechanics of such policies are time and again proven ineffective, if not disastrous.
Take the Drug War. Riddled with institutionalized racism, the government’s moral crusade to end the proliferation of drugs and addiction is by all measures an utter failure. 45 years after the Controlled Substance Act passed, heroin use has skyrocketed, the war on marijuana is incontrovertibly futile, and the violence police inflict on non-violent individuals while enforcing drug prohibition is commonplace. Another result of the government’s decades-long push to eradicate drugs? The world’s largest prison population, which often enjoys a steady flow of drugs behind bars while addicts are deprived of the treatment they need.
Only fifty years before the Drug War was instated, the United States government attempted to ban alcohol with the 18th amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was largely inspired by a temperance movement in the United States. While those who favored prohibition wanted to help improve society and solve alcoholism, their willingness to use the government to do so proved disastrous. Not only did “bootlegging” explode—so did organized crime. Those convicted of alcohol offenses during Prohibition overflowed jails and court systems, much like victims of the Drug War today. In 1933, government overcame its hubris and repealed the 18th amendment by passing the 21st. Today, alcohol still boasts a reputation as one of the most lethal drugs on Earth, alcoholism is still a societal ill, and the government still forces the same disastrous approach to addiction with its War on Drugs.
Organized crime, catalyzed by prohibition, inspired yet another ineffective state attempt to control behavior: the National Firearms Act of 1934. It instituted a $200 excise tax on the sale and transfer of certain weapons in a direct attempt to discourage possession of machine guns, sawed off shotguns, silencers, and other “gangster weapons” (as if black market mobsters were eager to obey government decrees). The bill was passed after the gruesome St. Valentine’s Day mob massacre. Though prohibition was repealed before this law was passed, it was a direct response to the violence created because of prohibition.