The prohibition of alcohol in the USA was a notorious fiasco.
The War on Drugs has been a deadly failure.
Bans on alternative nicotine products keep people smoking
cigarettes.
Attempts to suppress legal highs result in more drugs hitting the
market.
Prohibition doesn't work but the world is filled with
prohibitionists. Why?
Christopher Snowdon's new history of prohibitions is a panoramic
study of how bans begin, who instigates them and why they fail. It
is a story of moral panics, vested interests and popular hysteria,
driven by people who believe that utopia is only ever one ban away.
Includes: The campaign for alcohol prohibition in the USA
The worldwide ban on opium and the dawn of the War on Drugs
The curious case of the European Union's ban on oral tobacco (snus)
The 1920s crusade to suppress drinking worldwide
The prohibition of Ecstasy and the rise of designer drugs
The enduring appeal of prohibitionist policies today
"The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a
five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on
substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who
want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of
prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon s The Art of
Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although
Snowdon s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as
the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns
seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products
that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today,
is bound to fail miserably.
It is easy now, as Ken Burns has masterfully done, to ridicule the
prohibition of alcohol. But Snowdon does the heavy lifting of
catching modern-day Carrie Nations in the act. Despite a long
history of failure, the public always seems ready to enlist in
prohibitionist campaigns, perhaps believing, as Snowdon puts it,
that utopia is only ever one ban away. - Jeff Stier, Reason
magazine
"In masterfully charting the history of the prohibitionists war on
pleasurable substances, in highlighting their endless failures to
impose restrictions on the public, in exposing their dodgy use of
statistics and evidence bases to disguise moral arguments, and in
emphasising the ability of us as individuals to exercise our
capacity for self-restraint and personal responsibility, Snowdon
does all of us determined to challenge the contemporary
prohibitionist movement a great service." - Patrick Hayes, Spiked
When the law cuts off one avenue of pleasure, new sources are
invariably found, as Snowdon puts it. If there is any great demand
for a certain product, be it food, drink, drugs or sex, then the
risks of purveying it are met by colossal rewards. The Art of
Suppression is full of great facts its description of
opium-addicted Britain before the wars is particularly memorable.
But its real impact is its pithy denunciation of the prohibitionist
cause. It ends with a modest proposal for a more practical and
tolerant approach to drugs of all kinds. In his modesty Snowdon
does not hold much hope for implementation. But this book must make
that goal more likely." - Tom Miers, author of Democracy and the
Fall of the West
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