Kenn Gividen Quotes
Prohibition begets proliferation
Kenn Gividen, Businessman & Libertarian Activist, Libertarian Thoughts
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The poem was his summary of the Wickersham Commission’s (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement) conclusion regarding Prohibition.
Despite the known link to crime, and the fact that alcohol kills many times more Americans that do illicit drugs, Mr. Bennett and most of his successors did not target drinking in their various war on drug efforts despite the fact that alcohol is a much more dangerous and addicting drug than any of the illicit drugs. In the George W, Bush administration, health authorities in the government were ordered not to tell the public that alcohol was a drug despite the fact that all the Surgeon Generals and medical science has explained that it is not only a dangerous drug, but is a drug that induces violence more so than any other drug. The alcohol lobby did not want the public to associate the alcohol industry with the evils that drug dealers produce, so they used their political clout with the Bush administration for whom the industry provided large political contributions as well as conservative political consultants.
This anti-prohibition plank passed by the largest margin of any on the platform.
He was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and had sponsored the legislation enforcing Prohibition which was named for him as the Volstead Act. The American people soon changed their mind and flip flopped by passing another Constitutional Amendment nullifying the earlier Constitutional Amerndment.
With Prohibition, the demand for alcohol was the same as ever, but the supply was restricted. Since much of the alcohol in the south was produced in illegal stills, Prohibition, did not affect the supply from those sources. As a matter of fact history shows that they ramped up production to fill the supply gap that was created by Prohibition. The North had very few illegal stills before Prohibition and there was very little capability to replace the legal sources that Prohibition had curtailed.
