Counter-Currents
2,593 words
We all know the story.
Maybe we heard it in our high school history class.
Maybe we went through a libertarian phase where it was repeated ad nauseam as an argument for legalizing marijuana, cocaine, meth, and other hardcore substances—even if you dislike the substances themselves and would rather see them disappear from the face of the Earth.
Maybe we even repeated it ourselves!
As the argument goes, no matter how much you might like to see these substances disappear from society, prohibition simply doesn’t work—and we know this because, you see, we tried it already with alcohol. After a few years we had to stop the experiment, because it didn’t stop people from consuming alcohol. The only thing it did was cause people to blind themselves from bootlegging it poorly, and fuel crime by giving the mafia the opportunity to seize the black market in production and distribution. The message implicit in the very story itself is, of course, that that’s all we’re doing by prohibiting any drugs now: making consumption of those drugs more harmful for those who consume them, without reducing the total amount of consumption at all; and fueling black market crime.
Well, you’re reading an Alan Smithee article, so you probably know what you’re in for already. Isn’t this how it always seems to go with this kind of thing? The standard narrative we’ve been given is wrong. Alcohol prohibition was, in fact, successful. It most certainly was not responsible for an overall increase in crime. And the reason the experimented ended is not because it had failed!
In the February 2006 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, we can read the true story:
Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect. They rose after that, but generally did not reach the peaks recorded during the period 1900 to 1915.
Cirrhosis death rates, which were at almost 30 per 100,000 in 1911, fell to just under 11 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcohol-related psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. If the goal of prohibition was to reduce the ills associated with excess alcohol consumption, then it most certainly did in fact succeed at that aim.
The effect that Prohibition had on American culture even had benefits after Prohibition ended.
After Repeal, when tax data permit better-founded consumption estimates than we have for the Prohibition Era, per capita annual consumption stood at 1.2 US gallons (4.5 liters), less than half the level of the pre-Prohibition period. . . . Beer consumption dropped precipitously. Distilled spirits made a dramatic comeback in American drinking patterns, reversing a three-quarters-of-a-century decline, although in volume spirits did not reach its pre-Prohibition level.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that alcohol consumption finally reached back to its pre-Prohibition levels.
So what about crime? According to the University of Pennsylvania Department of Criminology’s Associate Professor Emily G. Owens, increases in racial diversity and urban concentration were the real reason for rises in violent crime over the years of Prohibition: “Americans, especially black Southerners, were moving into cities at the same time as immigrants from Europe and China.” The increase, in fact, occurred predominantly in the African-American community—and African-Americans at that time were not the people responsible for alcohol trafficking. Furthermore, any increases in death were entirely concentrated to individuals in their 20s—deaths unequivocally fell for those 30 and older. Crime rose because of urban yoots, not because of prohibition. Or as Owens puts it, the “relative increase was largest” in “urban states with large foreign-born populations.”
Owens points out that national prohibition didn’t introduce any sudden or drastic change: by the time the federal government got involved in prohibition, it was already illegal to sell alcohol in a full 32 states—and it remained illegal in many states even after repeal; Mississippi did not legalize alcohol until 1966. What this means is we can actually track the effect of prohibition on crime rates by looking at the states individually, one-by-one. When we do that, we find that “depending on the model, the actual effect of going dry ranges from a 5 percent increase to a 13 percent decrease in state homicide rates, with margins of error of 4 percentage points.”
But again, even these broad national numbers conceal the pattern which is evident in who dies. Even models that show an overall increase in crime still show that prohibition made life safer for children and mature adults, whereas any conceivable increase took place solely in young adults—and once again, even this increase is predominantly found only “in states with large immigrant and urban populations.”
To put it plainly, a child who dies from a beating given by an alcoholic parent, or a person innocently walking on the sidewalk who is hit by a drunk driver, is not equivalent to someone killed in a shoot-out during a drug deal gone awry. Prohibition may not have prevented all people from exposing themselves to heightened risk through their own choices, but it very, very probably lowered violent crime overall—and it most certainly lowered it for everyone younger or older than their 20s.
So why did Prohibition come to an end?
[H]istorians are fond of invoking widespread cultural change to explain the failure of National Prohibition. Decaying Victorian social mores allowed the normalization of drinking, which was given a significant boost by the cultural trendsetters of the Jazz Age. In such an atmosphere, Prohibition could not survive. But it did. At the height of the Jazz Age, American voters in a hard-fought contest elected a staunch upholder of Prohibition in Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, an avowed foe of the Eighteenth Amendment. Repeal took place, not in the free-flowing good times of the Jazz Age, but rather in the austere gloom 4 years into America’s worst economic depression.
Thus, the arguments for Repeal that seemed to have greatest resonance with voters in 1932 and 1933 centered not on indulgence but on economic recovery. Repeal, it was argued, would replace the tax revenues foregone under Prohibition, thereby allowing governments to provide relief to suffering families. It would put unemployed workers back to work. . . . it was not the stringent nature of National Prohibition, which set a goal that was probably impossible to reach and that thereby foredoomed enforcement, that played the leading role in discrediting alcohol prohibition [but] instead, an abrupt and radical shift in context [e.g. the Great Depression] . . .”
Prohibition did not end because it was a failure. It didn’t even end because the general population came to believe it had been a failure. It actually ended because people became desperate for work, and the alcohol industry was seen as a way to provide jobs. And the question of whether or not the alcohol industry does create jobs will be addressed even further below.
So what lessons should we learn from prohibition?
Currently, the CDC links alcohol to 88,000 deaths every single year in the United States, making it the third leading cause of preventable death after smoking and the combination of junk food and lack of exercise.
This adds up to 2.5 million years of potential life lost, which in turns means 2.5 million years of work that never gets done. The economic costs associated with this are estimated at $249 billion dollars. And that’s only counting the loss of productivity caused by death from alcohol—not all loss caused by alcohol in general, such as that owed to exacerbated symptoms of depression and anxiety caused by moderate alcohol consumption.
Nor does any of this include deaths due to alcohol-fueled violence, car crashes, or other problems.
Altogether, 40% of crimes for which we have convictions involve alcohol consumption. This number rises to 60% in cases of sexual abuse, 70% in cases of child abuse, and 86% in cases of murder.
If anything, we can now make a serious case that the repeal of prohibition has been an abject, disastrous failure resulting in wildly inflated rates of violence.
According to a National Institute of Health survey from 2016, a whopping 28% of the American adult public drink at heavy or at-risk levels—defined as more than 4 drinks on any given day, or more than 14 drinks in any given week. That’s 43% of all people who ever drink at all.
According to another nation-wide survey, whites are more likely to fall into each category of severity of alcohol use disorder (AUD) than blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, and less than 20% of people with lifetime AUD ever get treatment.
Furthermore, in men, alcohol lowers testosterone and raises estrogen: “In a four-week study, normal, healthy men who consumed 220 grams (7.7 oz) of alcohol daily saw their testosterone levels decline significantly after only five days — and continue to drop throughout the whole period of the study.”
And also raises activity of the enzyme responsible for converting androgens into estrogen: “Increased aromatization may be a mechanism for feminization of [male drinkers] . . . Over the long term, the oxidative stress of drinking also causes erectile dysfunction.”
In short: alcohol causes beer guts, bitch tits, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, and depression. It also plays a massive role in sexual degeneracy, sexual assault, child abuse, and a vast majority of all murders. And it has these effects on whites much more than it does on blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.
Obviously, we shouldn’t be raiding people’s homes on the suspicion that they might be brewing alcohol inside. We could, however, easily ban the industrial scale production and sale of alcohol without requiring draconian enforcement in order to reap tremendous social gains from doing so.
A further benefit of requiring that alcohol can only be produced domestically for domestic use is that for the most part, only those households which are stable enough to afford to keep domestic production going will have access to alcohol. As a tendency, this would help ensure that only those who are responsible enough to use alcohol would be capable of consuming it—without requiring anyone to decide on a case-by-case basis who is responsible enough. This would be inherently self-enforcing.
It may be politically unfeasible to re-implement a full-scale ban on commercial alcohol production overnight. But a 2010 review of the evidence shows why we wouldn’t need to in order to start reaping gains from treating alcohol like the serious and harmful drug that it is:
Nearly all studies, including those with different study designs, found that there was an inverse relationship between the tax or price of alcohol and indices of excessive drinking or alcohol-related health outcomes. Among studies restricted to underage populations, most found that increased taxes were also significantly associated with reduced consumption and alcohol-related harms.
Another 2010 review finds that: “doubling the alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%.”
And as far as those Depression-era concerns about jobs go, modern research (here’s one study, and here’s another) finds that the spending shift away from alcohol towards other goods in fact usually lead to more jobs. As Frank J. Chaloupka, PhD, distinguished professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago put it: “Money not spent on alcohol coupled with the newly raised tax revenues will be spent on other goods and services which will create jobs in non-alcohol sectors, offsetting any losses experienced in alcohol sectors.”
Think of this article as entry #2, after my last article about Murray Rothbard’s “non-aggression principle,” about why I am no longer a libertarian. The libertarian story of prohibition is, as a historical matter, just simply false — and there are in fact some taxes which should actually be implemented not just to raise revenue but because they would be socially beneficial in their own right.
Libertarians tried to tell me that I should read about Prohibition, because the things I would learn would convince me to want to legalize cocaine, meth, and other hard drugs as well. But their reading of Prohibition was based on myths and lies. I have these myths and lies to thank, however, for the fact that they inspired me to investigate the real story of prohibition for myself.
The libertarians wanted to convince me to support legalizing the industrial sale of drugs like heroin—instead, they helped me realize why it actually would be an amazingly good thing for society as a whole if we could keep meth and heroin illegal, and go back to prohibiting the industrial sale of alcohol too.
To repeat, this article is not calling for a full-scale “Puritanical” attitude towards alcohol. I would not prohibit personal consumption, or even small-scale local production of alcohol (and neither did historical Prohibition).
People should be free to brew their own alcohol. They should be allowed to bring their homebrewed alcohol to private events. This allows responsible consumption of alcohol, but by design does not allow anyone the option to run their life into the ground with alcoholism, because as soon as you start to do that, you can’t afford to keep brewing.
However, there is a very real dilemma here with how to handle the “double standards” argument. If alcohol is legally produced by corporations, why not weed? Why not LSD? Why not ecstasy?
These substances are less harmful than alcohol — usually at the individual level, and most definitely at the societal level, which is the level that matters most when deciding drug policy.
So if you oppose legal corporate production of drugs like LSD and ecstasy and you support the alcohol industry, the legalizers will call you a hypocrite — and they’ll be right. As documented in this essay, legalized corporate production of alcohol has been more destructive than legalization of weed or LSD would ever be. No matter what judicial stance we take towards weed or LSD, no study will ever find that weed is a factor in 84% of all murders or that LSD is a factor in 70% of all cases of child abuse.
My stance towards all of these substances is this:
1. Individual consumption should be judged on a case-by-case basis. Whether we’re talking about alcohol or LSD, there are at least some people who can consume responsibly with little or no ill effects. Nobody should be knocking on anyone’s doors or breaking in their homes in no-knock raids to check their fridges and closets or cars if they aren’t otherwise causing trouble.
But absent no-knock raids or warrant-free car searches, if you’re even capable of being arrested with any of these substances in the first place it probably is because you were doing something to justify your arrest, even if only scaring people while being publicly intoxicated with more alcohol or LSD than you could handle. If you can’t handle a substance well enough to know your own limits, then you aren’t responsible enough to consume it.
2. Legal industries devoted to the mass production and sale of any of these substances are absolutely bad news for society as a whole. And we are all better off as a rule when we reduce the availability of drugs in society in general.
This is a position that holds consistent to core principles regardless of what my personal biases about any given substance are.
The only other position that holds the same consistency is the far-left or radical libertarian option of simply legalizing everything.
And unless you take an equally consistent position that strikes at the root of their false historical narrative that begins in Prohibition, the drug pushers will exploit your hypocrisy for propogandic effect — and they will win.
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65 comments
This is a great article. When I was a kid, there was a punk rock offshoot called straight edge that preached no alchohol, no drugs, etc. It was pretty fascistic – everyone had same hair, same clothes, enforced ideology and behavior, but unfortunately devolved into antifa eco-warriors. I know I was straight edge first, then just found a movement of similar people. I wonder if “temperance” genes are inherent in our biology. Kind of like being left-handed. White people are either too chemical dependent, or not chemically dependent at all.
The crime stats are interesting to say the least – especially that prohibition crime stats were skewed by black migration patterns. Whiteness and Temperance could be a book.
Any thoughts on drug decriminalization in Portugal? Many see it as a successful model.
Well, without even delving into the statistical nuances involved here*, the most important thing to note is that they did not legalize drugs at all. They decriminalized personal possession, while keeping production and sale of drugs very illegal and punishable by law. This isn’t actually far from the position I’m calling for. Decriminalizing personal possession and use of a drug is very different from legalizing it for corporate production and sale.
* Some actually do argue for an all-else-equal increase in drug problems in Portugal after decriminalization, pointing out that drug use was already trending downwards well before decriminalization. So teasing apart the effect of decriminalization as such isn’t as easy as some of these articles would have you believe.
Update: here is one of the articles I had in mind.
https://www.cwporter.com/ronpaulnote.htm
This isn’t a very good article, but it answers your questions, if your questions are:
a) what do I think about libertarianism?
b) what do I think about legalizing drugs?
c) what do I think about Portuguese drug policies?
Thanks
B.B. (again)
Posted December 27, 2017 at 4:28 am | Permalink
I must have seen the statistic of “100,000 addicts cut to 40,000” about 40,000 times, starting about 20 years ago (it seems like about 40 years). It is obvious that they are not updating their statistics. What could the reason for that be?
Is it a crime to point that under the dictatorship there were next to no drugs in Portugal? Is it against the law to say that? No drugs and no graffitti.
Yes, joyless puritanism run by blue-nosed, sanctimonious shrikes is really going to pull the masses in the right direction.
Insisting on legislatively enforced cold baths for the populace is not a winning strategy. Grim, harsh abnegation and self-flagellation may appeal to a few fanatics, but most people are a bit more relaxed. Including most of the people throughout history you look up to, including Christ, all of whom drank some beer, wine, mead, whatever the local tipple was.
Also, Prohibition helped to make the Italian mafia and the Jewish mafia monstrously rich.
Ban drugs, keep the alcohol. You have to leave people some kind of pleasures.
Boy you are really pulling out the libertarian rhetorical stops.
I envision a world in which there are fewer children run down by drunk drivers. You see that as a world of harsh abnegation and self-flagellation.
Greg, I respect and admire your opinion at every turn, but this is blatant fear mongering. Everyone is aware of the dangers of alcohol and it’s still legal. The burgeoning right would do well to focus on all of the other drugs plaguing our people, such as flouride, aspartame, all of the xeno-hormones we get from food contact materials, and pharmaceuticals which do not cure but only placate symptoms. Alcohol is as old as time and man shall not be without it, nor should he; but the extremely new and potently damaging chemical drugs we all ingest to some degree can be stamped out and their deleterious effects stopped.
Evan, now yer talking. It is good that you pointed out the poisonous nature of possibly deadly, newly invented drugs that do nothing but cover up symptoms. However, this is not either-or (choose alcohol or choose prescription drugs). And for your entertainment:
https://abload.de/img/1er91.jpg
I am not sure that attempts to ban alcohol, even only the strongest kinds, would succeed unless we want to go full-bore Moslem law. Indeed, even despite harsh punishment, some Moslems still want the stuff and take a chance. As long as people have corn/potatoes, yeast, sugar and water and can throw together a still…
I have to wonder what you would make of the fact that the National Socialists in Germany owned stock in mineral water, required bakeries to replace white bread with whole wheat bread by law, and ran the world’s first, as well as most vicious anti-smoking campaign in history. In National Socialist propoganda and speeches, health and fitness are presented as every bit as much a crucial part of “racial hygiene” as anti-miscegenation laws. How were such self-flagellating fanatics ever able to gain the support of more than a fringe portion of the population?
Aedeon Cassiel?
most vicious anti-smoking campaign?
Here is one point-but certainly not the only-where jews, Muslims and “Nordic” fundies all converge. Prohibition was mainly fueled by hostility towards “ethnics” -including Germans and their breweries- by resentful WASPs under the guise of morality and public health.
P.S. You don’t have to be a Libertarian to oppose prohibition.
Prohibition was mainly fueled by hostility towards “ethnics” -including Germans and their breweries- by resentful WASPs under the guise of morality and public health.
That’s a common narrative, which Cassiel’s article implicitly debunks. It was an important theme in Ken Burns’ documentary on Prohibition: Uncool and rural Anglo-Saxons wanted rob urban Germans and Italians of an important pleasure, simply because they were uncool Anglo-Saxons who loathed newcomers and felt threatened by the cultural dynamism of cities.
In fact, the prohibitionists were genuinely concerned about the effects of alcohol. They thought the country would be much better of without it. Since, in their own experience from many dry jurisdictions, they knew that people could get along without alcohol, they saw no reason why the entire nation couldn’t become dry. They had a vision of temperate, self-sufficient citizens who could be happy and productive without endless consumption of stimulants and intoxicants.
I myself accept the standard view that Prohibition was a bad idea, and I’m not planning to stop drinking the occasional beer; but this narrative of resentful and joyless WASPs has always bothered me. If a WASP teetotaler in 1910 really disliked the Irish, he or she would have carted kegs of booze to their front doors, or would have built taverns next to urban school-yards.
American prohibitionists opposed alcohol primarily because they believed that alcohol wrecked families and destroyed lives, just as today people who believe heroin should remain illegal do so because they know that heroin destroys the lives of the people who inject it.
How about no interstate shipping of alcohol as a start?
So, I wonder why white people need to drink so much, even when they know it causes so many immediate and long-term problems? The only other group so seriously affected are the abos – hardly in our intellectual league, I am told. Maybe we are not such a superior bunch after all.
Any coming collapse (of our political system, economy or civilization – or the outright apocalyptic type) will separate out those humans deserving of continued existence. Nature always wins.
In the meantime, if another prohibition is imposed, white people are still going to want to “relax” and they will probably kill for anything that’ll do it for them. Folks were generally more moderate in the old days and most just accepted the prohibition instead of buying bad liquor from bootleggers. But we are an almost unrecognizable species now, more advanced in the quest for biological degeneracy than the other races (though they’re trying hard to catch up with us). We are a desperate lot, and will find a way for short-term good feelings and in much larger numbers.
Even as a physician who’s seen his fair share of cirrhosis, pancreatitis, delirium tremens, and other alcohol-related pathologies, I couldn’t get on board with a wholesale banning of alcohol sales. There’s a very clear distinction between alcohol and some of the other substances you mention, such as tobacco products and ecstasy – namely, that alcohol actually has apparent medical benefits when enjoyed in reasonable quantities, whereas any responsible physician would flatly tell a patient not to use any amount of tobacco product or amphetamine (unless that latter were clinically indicated, say for ADHD). But apart from health benefits, all but the most ascetic know that alcohol has a sweet spot – that point after a drink or two when you’ve got the emotional warmth and bravery to o in for the kiss, that couple (this word was chosen consciously!) of drinks that makes the family get-together flow and allows more bonding to ensue. Etc. Except in those with liver dysfunction, alcohol is metabolized at fairly predictable rates, so it’s unique in that sense, too. I hem and haw about weed because, while I think occasional indulgence thereof can lead to amazing experiences, it’s impossible to quantify (at least, at this time) how much of the drug is being delivered to the system and how soon the effects will dissipate.
Great European civilizations have achieved magnificence without resorting to prohibition of alcohol sales, so I hardly think that beer and wine should be on any sort of chopping block. The social maladies that accompany drinking are highly unfortunate, but – like gun violence and everything else – it has both risks and benefits.
I would not, that said, be unwaveringly averse to the banning or strict limitation of “hard” alcohol sales. It’s far easier for people to overindulge or incorrectly gauge how much they’ve drunk when they consume whiskey, vodka, and so on. I’d miss my Knob Creek, but I could do without it, haha.
In short… yes, alcohol exerts some terrible effects, particularly on those genetically or circumstantially geared toward abuse. But there are also benefits that responsible people can appreciate. The problems should be approached – pardon the quip – with moderation.
Well, the issues with other drugs you mention aren’t quite so clear-cut, either.
Ecstasy appears to be extremely useful for PTSD. Nicotine even has neurological benefits – as nicotine is an analogue of nicotinamide, also known as B6, which plays a significant role in ADHD, bipolar, and schizophrenia. I’ve personally found nicotine gum an extremely useful aid to productivity, and never had the slightest issues with adsiction to it in chewed form. Addiction is, of course, a function of the speed at which a chemical hits your system as much as it is a function of the chemical itself.
I’ve also done more LSD in the past than I would care to admit, and as a result of that have insights into myself whose value has lasted well beyond the drug-induced altered state, and music I don’t think I could have composed in any ordinary state of mind. Weed never produced any significant creativity or insight for me, but it did help emotionally stabilize me through times my life became extremely difficult and there was simply nothing I could have done to change the situation or make it better, and I don’t think I would have benefited in those periods of my life by foregoing it.
So it’s been amusing to me to see how quickly the accusations that I must be some prudish, teetotaling straight edge fanatic have taken flight. If anything, I deserve to be critiqued for my involvement in thiT movement for having been too degenerate.
So with that said, it may sound funny, but I truly do unironically believe that the position I’m advocating here is the most moderate position there is. 1) As long as you aren’t acting chaotic enough to scare your neighbors to death, you shouldn’t be stopped from doing any drug you can get your hands on – as long as you can afford it, keep it fairly private, and not act vicoiusly weird in public because of it. 2) We should just try to limit how available these kinds of substances are in society, overall – and we shouldn’t let corporations spend billions of dollars pushing them.
What I’m proposing wouldn’t require an end to your moderate family gatherings. I would never want anyone knocking on their doors jusf because they received a tip that someone might be drinking alcohol inside – and I wouldn’t want that to happen just because they received a tip they might be growing weed or mushrooms in one of their closets, either. What I’m proposing would, however, bring a dramatic reduction in child abuse, STD transmission rates, murder, deaths from drunk driving, and billions of dollars in lost productivity all while surprisingly creating jobs.
The reason I think this position is the most moderate one available with respect to alcohol is because I also think it’s more obviously the most moderate position available when it comes to cocaine, meth, acid, weed, and anything else. Don’t waste time and energy and priosn space giving extremely harsh sentences to people you catch doing any of these things (what we have now) – but also don’t create whole industries with billions of dollars to spend pushing them (legalization).
The most radical part of it is that it pits us against monied interests. But that should be nothing new for us. Fighting the devastation of our people for profit is already what this whole thing is about.
You referred to Vitamin B6, but I think maybe you mean Vitamin B3. Dr. Abram Hoffer is known for helping serious mental patients with Vitamin B3.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/review_hoffer_B3.html
Right. Thanks!
Thanks for the link about MDMA as a potential treatment for PTSD; I’d been aware of LSD’s newly-appreciated psychiatric uses, but I hadn’t been aware of that being the case for amphetamines – of course, I doubt that such amphetamines would be prescribed in such doses as are found in the pills taken by ravers, as those can induce heart attacks and other undesirable cardiovascular outcomes. As far as nicotine goes, I’m not sure whether the benefits are worth the health trade-offs for those of us fortunate enough to not suffer from psychiatric illness (which is why I specified “tobacco”, not nicotine) – it does increase blood pressure and heart rate (at least during use), and Westerners hardly need additional cardiovascular risk factors loaded upon those already present.
In a sense, I agree with you that your position is – upon consideration – a fairly moderate one. I currently have the misfortune to live in NY, and while there may be some self-selection at play, the fact that there’s a wine/liquor store on just about every other block where I live probably doesn’t speak all that well about the state of this society. And, yes – it’s terribly saddening to read about DWI fatalities and mistreatment of family members by alcohol abusers.
I’ll write what I “jokingly” (but not really) said to someone at a party last week – “Weed should be legal for those with an IQ >120.” More generally, many of those on the far-Right will probably agree with the concept that… well, not everyone is equally suited to have exactly the same rights as their co-citizens. It would be a hard sell to legally enact this “inequality”, but *rational* egalitarian policy can’t really be created without coming to this theoretical conclusion.
While we are all pretending we have any power or influence, I’ll just say keep the alcohol, legalize the production and distribution of natural “drugs” such as cannabis, mushrooms, khat, kratom, and many more. And illegalize the pharmaceuticals that kill in the hundreds of thousands every year like fentanyl, OxyContin, chemo. Return to nature and not be a jerk about it.
From the back during the days in the pale of the settlement when Jewish tavern keepers would require Gentiles to come and spend some of their money in the taverns by the authority of feudal Lords it seems to me that part of Jewish power is keeping the goy in a lowly State by keeping them inebriated and numbed to Jewish economic power and policies of race replacement.
I see my American cousins are dying from an opiod crisis and Mr Cassiel thinks it an opportune moment to harp on about puritan (talmudic) tendencies against alcohol. This same rhetoric gave power to such female pressure groups like MADD.
As for the claims of ‘hypocisy’ Mr Cassiel should familiarize himself better with arguments made by Peter Hitchens who has been pointing out the complete failure of the drug ‘war’ – that in fact it was a war that was never fought.
In truth White Nationalists should be far more concerned about the real health crisis affecting American whites and it really isn’t alcohol.
I have discussed the opioid crisis in print elsewhere.
I have also addressed in print the leftist/libertarian myth that the war on drugs hasn’t worked. It has – at least in the American context I write about and am most familiar with.
As to whether or not there is a “real” crisis with regards to alcohol, well, the numbers cited in the post don’t lie. Personal distaste for MADD – which has generally been found in polls to be the single most popular non-profit in the whole country – does nothing to change them.
Anybody every think to answer the question, “Why do white people need or want drugs so much?” By drugs, I include alcohol and all prescription and illegal mood-altering substances.
Prescriptions for 64.7m items of antidepressants – an all-time high – were dispensed in England in 2016, the most recent annual data from NHS Digital showed. That was 3.7m more than the 61m items dispensed during 2015.
http://time.com/4900248/antidepressants-depression-more-common/
Is it always someone else’s fault? Do we really need this stuff (i.e., there are no alternatives) or are we so spoiled from the postwar good times that we run to a pill or a drink to snuff out our feelings? Is everything that’s wrong with our culture directly caused by mass immigration, which is what some parties like to attribute our behavior to? If you ask me, which you didn’t, maybe there is a pre-existing tendency and this requires further investigation. Maybe we have a flaw that makes us always go for what’s easiest in certain areas of life.
Having struggled from depression for a very long time, and having used all the non-chemical coping methods in existence (willpower, physical exercise, passion, religion…) before taking a successful SNRI, I can now say with the utmost confidence that clinical depression is not a behavioral issue but a serious disorder of the brain itself, exactly as “establishment medicine” claims.
Even if you manage to get by on an iron will alone (which in practice is far easier imagined than done) the disorder in your neurotransmitters will negatively affect other aspects of your life anyway. Seeing everything in the negative or having very reduced focus/memorization abilities is very common. Functioning on depression is possible, but this function will tend to stay lower than normal despite your best efforts.
I have noticed, mostly from anecdotal experience with a circle of acquaintances, that dysthymia / cyclothymia / depression seems frequent among the Right and atypical thinkers in general. And I have also noticed that many adamantly refuse to address possible biochemical causes, out of technophobia or superstition about personal identity. Ironically, some do not see any problem with abusing alcohol or nicotine to cope.
This is a pity and often a tragedy. Having a poor mood never made me a better thinker or person, despite past attempts to convince myself that it did. It just made me lazy and irritable.
Anti-depressants are very capable drugs, but the thing to be understood is that they work randomly. Depending on your genome and baseline neurotransmitter levels, it usually takes several random tries to find the right match, and many abandon the process too early.
As to the ever-increasing popularity of these drugs: my best guess is that the number of people with dysthymia has stayed the same over the decades, at roughly 15 to 20% of the population. But before, they coped with alcohol, television or true religious faith.
@Thomas. Trying to cure or cope with depression or other mental disorders with willpower, yak therapy or religion is crazy. Mind you, I’ve heard that religion sometimes helps. Not often, though. I have also heard that Truehope Empower Plus has been helpful for those with depression or bipolar. Just passing it along.
Aedon made it clear his idea was not to make alcohol illegal per say, freedom works for the responsible who earn it by the example of their behavior. In the more self sufficient community model we must eventually shoot for, home brewing will be a part of that amongst many other skills. A future ethno-state is not going to be America 1950-2017 redux but this time without the racial minorities.
I enjoy a nice cold beer myself knowing full well it is the slave drink of agrarian civilization. Mead and wine are more for the conquerors (joke alert).
Which is strange, given that mead (and wine I imagine) is far less complex to brew than beer.
Maybe they were too busy training in combat or conquering others to be too involved in the complexities of brewing with grains. The Mongols drank a fermented milk type of booze and they would get absolutely hammered on it. After the deed at hand and the battles were finished of course.
I am no Puritan on this but we can be honest about it. Overall we could and should drink less alcohol than we do, a lot less.
Great article. Thanks. My experience at white nationalist gatherings leads me to think that there is an alcohol over-consumption problem in our circles. I will grant that I have been a willing participant, but I’d say there are probably better things we can be doing with our time and money.
From what I can tell, our ancestors looked favorably upon the consumption of alcohol but frowned upon drunkenness. This seems to be a reasonable stance. At very least we can save the revelries for truly special occasions.
Mickey Spillane was a Jehovah’s Witness, and when asked why he drank beer (and did commercials for Miller Light) said that the Bible spoke against drunkenness, not drinking as such.
Info on effects of the hops in beer:
Moderate alcohol consumption has been found to decrease testosterone levels by up to 6.8%. Believe it or not, the hops in most types of beer have estrogen-like properties and can adversely affect testosterone. In fact, the estrogenic properties in hops are so strong that they are currently being studied as a treatment for hot flashes in menopausal women. This is another reason to avoid having a beer belly! – Dr. William Rawls
No, beer is not better for you, though apparently there is a no-hops beer-like alcoholic drink, which is the way it used to be made a very long time ago.
Well, you’ve almost got me convinced, especially if the Fuhrer is behind it!
One thing, though. I recall seeing, several years ago, some History Channel show about Prohibition, and they pointed out that it had some unintended effects. Yoots learned that obeying the law was stupid and uncool, while their parents learned to hobnob with Jews and Negroes.
The example they explored was Toots Shore, a Jew whose restaurant/speakeasy in the theatre district became famous. (I recall Jackie Gleason talking about it in the 60s). There, you could have a drink and across the way was the Mayor of NYC, over there a Supreme Court justice, etc. Needless to say, the hip music was provided by Negroes. Meanwhile, mom and dad WASP were having Jews enter the home for the first time in order to make bootleg liquor deliveries.
This being TV, this was presented as a GOOD thing.
So the rural Protestant crusade against the dirty drunken Micks and Wops in the cities resulted in the Jew and Negro gaining entre to WASP homes, and jazz and crime becoming cool.
So, how does a WN factor those costs in?
An interesting and contrarian article.
I wonder if anyone has ever made a study of the *contribution* of alcohol to western civilization. The Greeks and Romans were inveterate drinkers; as were the Vikings, our Renaissance forebears, the Elizabethans, . . . , hell, just about every Männerbund gathering used alcohol to oil the wheels of the patriarchy – not excluding medieval monks!
If the West had been fuelled by cannabis or opium I doubt it would have achieved so much.
Let’s make a study of the contributions of cirrhosis of the liver, senseless brawls, abused spouses and children, alcoholic psychosis and dementia, and driving/governing/doctoring/lawyering/parenting etc. under the influence to Western civilization.
Using the world “fueled” begs the whole question, of course. Why not use the word intoxicated?
I would love to know what we could have accomplished if whites had zero tolerance for alcohol.
Greg Johnson,
Before the article above was posted, I was actually thinking of asking you about the frequency of alcoholism among White nationalists, as it’s an issue you’ve raised before. In your estimate, how widespread is it, and how much of a problem is it?
Alcohol and drug use are widespread problems in America as a whole, and in the WN world they strike me as worse than average. There is a culture that tolerates and encourages heavy drinking. Illegal drug use is more furtive, of course, but still a problem. I used to be somewhat more tolerant of such things. I actually wrote an articles called “Drug Legalization in the White Republic.” But in the last few years, with the enormous growth of the movement, I have gotten to know more millennials and Gen-Z people, and it became clear to me the amount of suffering to families and children caused by drug use among Boomer and Gen-X parents. Suddenly I was meeting people who lost both parents to drug use, or who had significant numbers of classmates and friends who died of drug overdoses. Laissez-faire attitudes about drugs are a criminal self-indulgence of the Boomers and Gen-X, who are oblivious to or are evading the social problems caused by legal and illegal drug use.
The least we need in the Alt-Right movement is jump on the “prohibition” bandwagon: drugs, alcohol, guns, hate speech, diesel cars, money laundering, knifes, whatever is next.
There are several flaws in the “prohibition” ideology.
First, the complete failure of the war on real drugs, heroin, cocain, etc. where more non-consumers and innocents die and are incarcerated than those consuming, should make it clear that these “prohibitions” have more collateral casualties than real ones. Northern Mexico is only one of the examples.
Second, any such “prohibitions” are rapidly degenerating in large scale government control and intrusion in private life, bank accounts etc.
Third, comparing alcohol prohibition countries (e.g. Scandinavia) with liberal ones (e.g. France, Italy, Germany) shows that the worst excesses (completely drunken on sidewalks, “ferry drinkers”, …) are to be inspected in prohibition countries, not in France or Germany where students can buy wine and beer in university restaurants.
Fourth, our WN culture should be based on education and convincing and not on prohibition and criminalizing.
Last but not least, those who will make money on any new “prohibitions” will be the (((same that made it from the past prohibitions))) and which wikipedia will then exult as “Canadian philantropists”.
The first and last serious call for prohibition I remember reading, was an interview with Pamela Anderson in the JFK Jr.’s short-lived George Magazine. Having just left an abusive marriage to a man with whom she had been in love, Ms. Anderson made the exceeding obvious point that alcohol is a danger to women and children.
An urbanite social worker I know, claims incest is a near-universal feature in the lives of lumpenproletariat women and girls, and that it basically never occurs without the influence of alcohol.
The kind of mythos which Boomers and their spiritual descendants apply to the “failure of prohibition” is a microcosm of their expansive moral cowardice: the willingness to ceed any ground to consumption, on the flimsiest pretext of personal freedom or economic utility: their refusal to acknowledge that adults can have different levels of agency: the stylish indifference to human suffering that masquerades as tolerance.
I am so heartened to see Aedon and Counter Currents standing against the passivity with which America conceives its alcohol problem. Just as I was excited to hear Mike Enoch musing about about an anti-opioid rally. These issues have as much moral urgency as any other issue on the alt-right, and could be a source of much needed growth in 2018.
While I’d love to see everyone voluntarily stop drinking, I am wondering about this statement:
An urbanite social worker I know, claims incest is a near-universal feature in the lives of lumpenproletariat women and girls, and that it basically never occurs without the influence of alcohol.
I guess you know what’s coming: are sexually disturbed men more likely to be loosened up by alcohol to the point where they can’t control their urges; or can alcohol drinking cause a truly decent man to suddenly want to molest his daughters? Cause/effect, association/causation, etc. Would banning alcohol with severe punishment for infraction stop involuntary incest?
Also: it’s not “America” that has an alcohol problem, it’s mostly white people wherever we are. And I see that your concern about alcohol morphed into some all-too-common Boomer-bashing. I can find serious flaws in the previous generations, too, not to mention countless young degenerates passing as human. This bunch may not be alcoholic, but they sure love their weed.
Alcohol is indeed a danger to women and children. It pains me to say this, because I’m one of the lucky people who can have two or three drinks a week without ever having a problem with it.
Unfortunately, drunken wife beaters make women afraid of starting a family without having an independent source of income. Alcoholism and associated domestic violence are a legitimate grievance feminists used to promote their agenda, which has been so harmful to us.
Funny: decades before Hollywood made money with Humphrey bogarting his joints, the National Socialists showed scientific evidence that smoking is causing cancer and prohibited publicity.
The interesting point is, neither alcohol nor tobacco were prohibited or excessively taxed in NS Germany, the much vilified Goebbels ministry for “Volksaufklärung” did what its name says: inform the people.
And another interesting detail:
Contrary to the smoking drunkards Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, the fascist leaders Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were giving examples to their people.
I certainly agree with the gist of this: educating and role modeling are undeniably important, and something we could all use more of.
However, it does bear mention that: “The Nazi anti-tobacco campaign included banning smoking in trams, buses and city trains, limiting cigarette rations in the Wehrmacht, organizing medical lectures for soldiers, and raising the tobacco tax”. I’m truncating a quote from Wikipedia, the citation is here.
Definitely thought-provoking and I feel the need to read a lot more about Prohibition in order to evaluate the claims being made. I suppose in my current ignorance I can make a couple of points.
If people genuinely prefer to drink themselves to death rather than be productive, I don’t think there is a strong case to be made that they need to be saved from themselves by force. Think about what that means: it means using the threat of lethal violence to stop people from killing themselves. It seems a little absurd and redundant.
It’s different, of course, when you’re talking about using a threat of lethal violence to prevent one person harming another through excessive alcohol consumption. Libertarians disagree on whether e.g. drunk driving should be allowed on public roads; it depends on how you define imminent threats (does taking the wheel under the influence itself constitute a threat of harm, or only when you start driving erratically?). Then also we have to consider what rules will apply once all public spaces are privatized; a private road owner can set whatever rules he likes, which may well include bans on drunk driving. What I’m saying is that, in a fully private property community, you could quite plausibly get the kind of prohibition regime you lay out.
I’ve always thought that alcohol is far too available, affordable, n easily purchased. It seems every strip center has a booze store, more than coffee shops. I’ve seen too many young people say they can’t stop drinking even while downing yet another beer. Now we’re adding industrial pot to the list, just in time to afflict a generation of gender-confused, depressed, unemployed youth trying to decide whether to genocide a church or play another round of Kill Em All video games. Drudge report just posted news about the growing epidemic of vomiting due to chronic pot use. Our libertarian overlords can now look forward to trains jumping their tracks because the stoned n drunk drivers are too busy vomiting to watch the signals. Not to mention trucks, planes, n your son in law rushing to his latest “job interview”.
People are going to want a drink now and then – whether it’s a glass of wine, beer or belt of whiskey. Moderation is what needs to be preached. Maturity and self-discipline are what is greatly missing in our decadent society. The first comment about life and influences in National Socialist Germany are spot on. If vices aren’t allowed to be “glorified” as they are in our jew-controlled countries, then a more wholesome generation of men and women will inevitably arise. So, once again, we see the undeniable importance and power of the media and (((who controls it))). Culture either blossoms or decays depending on the soil from which it is birthed.
I started out sympathetic to the arguments presented here, simply because I have no time (and never have) for libertard foolishness of any kind. But at the same time; ban drinking?
To Australians, this sounds like heresy.
But then I thought about the relationship between some of the early ‘dry’ Australian fraternal societies (eg the Rechabites) and the groups that forged the White Australia policy. There was a strong bond between the old fraternal groups (Mannerbund?) and the organised labour movement up until the 1970’s in Australia. Both groups saw alcohol as a problem – an opiate of the working classes. Until that time, both favoured strict immigration restriction.
A key example is that of William Lane. A complete teetotaller, he ruined his utopian experiment in Paraguay through forcing his views on others. Was he correct? Probably.
But did his strict rules alienate his followers? Absolutely.
Your proposal to allow the consumption of home brewed alcohol seems like a fair compromise. It would limit drinking to those responsible enough to plan ahead for their own personal use. The same principle could be applied to those using pot or psilocybin for their own enjoyment. Those who point to historic examples of Norse/Germanic use of alcohol or drugs (eg fly agaric) should consider that these folk had no access to cheap booze 24/7 at the local shop – they had to brew, grow or collect their own.
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Speaking of Australia, one Australian beer advertisement had the line, “Destiny is calling, but beer is on the other line. Hello beer.” This appalling advertisement perfectly expressed the ethic of what David Mosler has called “the recreational society” — a society incapable of seriousness.
In America, we call it being “poolside.”
True. The ad in question is appalling. Even 20 years ago, beer advertisements in Australia used oblique associations with sport or ‘a hard earned thirst’ imagery to promote the product.
I think the appeal to hipster irresponsibility in advertising goes further than alcohol advertising today, though. My current pet hates are the ads for pay day lenders. Some bearded twat in extended adolescence wrecks his apartment and needs $5K to fix it. No worries, just Nimble the money and you’ll have it this afternoon.
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When I read this prohibition fanatism paired with “home brew” phantasies, I cannot help thinking there is some truth in how our enemies view us: a lunatic fringe.
How can one seriously object to alcohol and downplay the dangers of home brewing/destillation by chemical amateurs for “private use” ?
And of course any prohibition will/can make no clear there distinction between normal and abuse. In France each time an old lady is interviewed how she made it over 100, she invariably mentions her daily glass of red wine.
Just for the record: I dont drink red wine and are far from 100.
As a recovering alcoholic, plus heroin and cocaine addict, I’m happy to see this article. I will say Hollywood brainwashes our youth into thinking it’s cool to abuse these things. That’s why youths can have a glass of wine in France, but not in the USA without having 6 more. And I do believe addiction is a genetically heritable trait. Being born with this trait and having it set off is essentially a death sentence if you don’t have the self-discipline to get your life together. Many people don’t see life as being worth living and, as bad as being addicted to a substance that no longer makes you happy is, it’s the only thing they know. Being without hope is a terrible thing. That being said, heroin wasn’t being pushed in the suburbs in the 50’s, and as a result no one was using it. Now that it’s available, they are in droves. Having been to rehabs, outpatients, meetings as much as I have, I honestly think banning it is as close as you’ll get to solving a problem that can, and will never go away.
The problem with America and this issue is, protestantism, protestantism, protestantism and did I mention, protestantism. It’s the cancerous gift that keeps on giving. Truly Catholic, cultures don’t have this problem with alcohol. The prots did away with fasting and acts of mortification. You will never solve the problems in America until you acknowledge the inherent rot in protestantism.
What about Jansenism?
I would probably quit drinking if prohibition returned…and I would be better for it.
Punching Alc-Right?
I always like to see, when a new essay on cc bears the name of mister Cassiel. This essays are always full of usefull information and stringent arguments. But in this one, he has not the right approach imo. He talks to much about alcohol. Well, sounds like a stupid objection against an articel about prohibition. What am I thinking about: If my wife cooks a good dinner, we are eating, listening to a good piece of music and we are not drinking “alcohol” to it, we are enjoying a good bottle of wine together. A good bottle of wine is not just alcohol, it is culture in the primordial sense of the word. It is hard work to produce something like that, it needs passion and knowledge. It is a part of the food culture, and not only “alcohol”. A beer at the end of a hot summerday is something joyful, and I don’t like the prospect to drink some home-brewed horse piss, when we have a tradition of good brewerys (sometimes centurys old) who know how to brew delicious beer, just because trading with alcoholic stuff is forbidden. The difference between alcohol and hard drugs is, nobody sticks a needle in he’s arm, because it is such a nice social pratice. He does it to be high and to be high only. It’s not possible to take a line cocaine without a jag, but it is possible to drink some beer and have a nice day with your friends without beeing wasted. In fact, Mr. Cassiel is not talking about alcohol, he is talking about alcohol abuse. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and call for another prohibition.
I also don’t share the authors view, that “there are at least some people who can consume responsibly with little or no ill effects”. Nearly all of my family and friends are drinking on a weekly or at least monthly base. How many addicts are in this group? None! As far as my experience goes, most of the people can consume responsibly. I know also two muslim guys, they are consuming no alcohol at all. And guess what, they are the ones with the bellys and bitch tits, not me. I am nearly looking like Adonis, compared to them. Well, at least I am trained. So whats the problem? Maybe they are eating the wrong (unhealthy) stuff. Should we then not punish people who are doing too little sports and eating the wrong food. Shall we forbid burgers too? Sounds to me like some leftwing hyper-moralism.
There are problems with alcohol abuse, sure. Let’s focus on them, not on beer and wine as a whole.
I know also two muslim guys, they are consuming no alcohol at all. And guess what, they are the ones with the bellys and bitch tits, not me.
One important function of the liver is to balance hormones in both men and women. While I am not a fan of alcohol, it is an oversimplification to say that only alcohol can cause the liver to be unable to function normally. From an older nutrition book that I have:
When an injured liver permits female hormones to accumulate, men occasionally develop enlarged, swollen breasts. I have seen a surprising number of such cases, all of them college boys living on the cheapest food available. One shy, bookish law student…became alarmed over the implication that his masculine prowess was below par…Another was a divinity student who was deeply shocked because his physician had asked him if he were homosexual. The swelling of the breasts subsides a few weeks after the diet is made adequate. Failure to inactivate male hormones has been produced in female rats by inadequate diets…
Limited enzyme synthesis allowing the accumulation of hormones has been produced in animals by diets deficient in Vitamin B1, B2, niacin, pantothenic acid, tryptophane and especially cholin, vitamin C and E, and the sulfur-containing amino acids. Such injury is prevented or corrected when the missing nutrient is added. Vitamin A – generally 100,000 units daily – has been used successfully in treating swollen breasts and in inactivating excessive thyroid in humans. ..In any case where foods are inefficiently utilized or hormones appear to be excessive, liver damage should be considered as a possible cause.
The above was written by a consulting nutritionist in the 1960s.
What is the title/author of this book on nutrition?
Let’s Get Well by Adelle Davis
1965 Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/03/redrug-decriminalisation-portugal-0
This article, by a Portuguese physician, says that Portuguese drug policies are a failure.
There is a great deal of propaganda, most of it originating from the Cato Institute, a “libertarian think tank” financed by the Koch brothers, a couple of Jewish billionaires. Some sources claim there are now 55,000 heroin “users” (it is no longer fashionable to call them “addicts”), others say 25,000; some years ago I read somewhere that the total figure has doubled. They are not keeping reliable statistics. At the present time, I don’t think you can believe anything you read on the subject. There is too much propaganda. Out of 5 people I talked to who had been to Lisbon, 2 or 3 had been mugged. That was 10 years ago. There are too many contradictions.
I don’t pretend to know what the truth is, but I am very sceptical.
This is a very good article, by the way.
Opium isn’t even toxic, its just a vegetable that’s addictive. but like tobacco also replicates quickly that one need never be without or pay highly for.
The moment you go banning vegetables you’ll give rise to militants and artificial forms of the plant (heroin, fake cannabis, cocaine [coca], methamphetamine [ephedra]
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