Happy Repeal Day!

"This Friday, Dec. 5, is the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day, the day America repealed its disastrous alcohol prohibition. Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives' grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably...There's no question that drug prohibition has been every bit the failure alcohol prohibition was. Nearly 40 years after the Controlled Substances Act passed, we have 400,000 people in prison for nonviolent drug crimes; a domestic police force that often looks and acts like an occupying military force; nearly a trillion dollars spent on enforcement, both here and through aggressive interdiction efforts overseas; and urban areas that can resemble war zones. Yet illicit drugs like cocaine and marijuana are as cheap and abundant as they were in 1970. The street price of both drugs has actually dropped — dramatically — since the government began keeping track in the early 1980s. The main difference between the two prohibitions is that one was enacted lawfully, and once it became clear that it had failed, we repealed it (and government revenues soared with new alcohol taxes). As the drug war has failed, the government merely claims more powers to fight it more aggressively."

Reason magazine's Radley Balko on why Repeal Day drives home the folly of the war on drugs.