Now, I have to ask, which ‘angry residents’? The perennial grumpy-pantsed, proudly ignorant and half-senile old duffers who are always yelling at kids to get off their lawns? The control-freak Linda Taylor types who believe they can micro-monitor ‘the children’ into blissful (and non-existent) safety? Lawmen showing up in town halls in (taxpayer supplied) uniforms to try to intimidate lawmakers? And of course, William S. Burrough’s favorites: …decent church-goin’ women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces”?

Those ‘angry residents’?

Well in reality it isn’t an expanding business at all. It’s just that the revenues are now visible as they’re being diverted from the invisible black market onto the books of licensed businesses. Of course that means taxes are being collected, criminals are making less money, etc. All I can figure out is that people are effin’ crazy.

“Do no evil”?? Fuck you, Google.

Our opponents believe that drug prohibition is immutable, inviolable, set in stone, eternal. They mirror the same sentiments of Texas Senator Morris Sheppard in 1930 when he spoke about alcohol Prohibition: ” “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”‘ 3 short years later, Sheppard and his ilk were in desperate need of ketchup to cover the taste of the crow they were forced to eat.

This article gives a feel for what it was like for the anti-Prohibition forces, who faced the same problems we do, the same kind of sneering derision that they were engaging in a ‘fool’s errand’. It mirrors the very same sense of almost forlorn hope combined with deep cynicism that we presently must endure…but, endure we will.

For, history records who had the last laugh. because, like us today, the anti-Prohibitionists had one terrible, implacable, overwhelmingly powerful ally on their hands. That ally could not be scorned, nor could it be suborned. It could not be bribed or arrested and imprisoned on false charges and silenced. Nothing could be done to it, because it wasn’t a living being at all.

I am referring, to, of course, the economy. And we face the same ‘harsh schoolmaster’ in today’s economic problems. And his ‘hickory switch’ still stings like a MFer when you’re hit with it, as millions have found out and continue to.

As much as I hate it, it will not be voice of sweet reason but the scream of pinched pennies that will herald the end of drug prohibition…just as it was the last time.