There are many differences between constitutional alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition that make drug law reform problematic. In the 1920s only one substance was at issue. Now there are several whole classes of them. Alcohol prohibition was repealed after only 13 years. But federal drug prohibition began over 75 years ago when opiates and cocaine were criminalized, and has been supplemented regularly ever since. Marijuana was criminalized over 50 years ago, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) 20 years ago, and MDMA (better known as "Ecstasy") in 1984 (Brecher 1972; Goode 1989).

Alcohol had been in popular recreational use for several millennia be-fore prohibition. By the early 1930s half of the adults in the United States drank, and the vast majority of adults in most big cities wished to drink occasionally; they continued to do so during the prohibition era. Local police were rarely enthusiastic supporters of prohibition, and they themselves drank.

Today, however, despite widespread experimentation, even the most popular illicit drug, marijuana, was used by only about 20 percent of all adults in the last year. This is a sizable minority, but alcohol prohibition affected the majority. Further, unlike the 1930s, the prohibitionist ethos has attained legitimacy among nearly all police and politicians, most of whom believe that illicit drugs are extremely dangerous and that no one should use them. There are no longer any "wet" legislators to criticize prohibitionist policies and introduce alternatives, only "drys" debating other "drys." To imagine a political context comparable to that of repeal, we would have to assume that most police and at least half of the elected officials in the United States were moderate marijuana users, and that a sizable minority had used LSD and cocaine.

In the "Roaring Twenties" a new, urban middle-class generation came to maturity. They were the first post-Victorian generation and they tended to oppose what they saw as the repressive, puritanical restrictions of temperance. Further, by 1930 the political power of the Anglo-American middle class had been diluted by a large number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who brought with them cultural traditions that regarded drinking as a normal part of life. To them, alcohol prohibition seemed a bizarre custom imposed by moralistic fanatics. By the early 1930s, alcohol did not seem as threatening to as many as it once had. Antidrinking sentiment was weaker than it had been for 100 years, and it was becoming even weaker. Together with the widely perceived failures of prohibition, the‘ demographic and cultural shifts helped render antialcohol ideology bankrupt.

There are today no comparable demographic or cultural changes. Most Americans are now as fearful of drugs as middle-class Americans were about alcohol at the start of the century. Current immigrants do not come from drug using cultures. The baby-boomers who popularized the recreational u‘ of marijuana and other drugs in the 1960s are in middle age. They are watching their health, restricting their consumption of illicit and licit drugs, and (like their own parents were) worrying about the drug u‘ of their children.

Over and above natural citizen concern about very real drug problems, antidrug sentiment has been cultivated by politicians’ drug war speeches, mass media scale stories, and multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns to a degree that turn-of-the-century temperance crusaders would envy (Reinarman and Levine 1989). Indeed, the use of drinking as a scapegoat explanation for social problems, which was so prominent in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century temperance and prohibitionist rhetoric, is reproduced today in antidrug campaigns. Long-standing problems like urban poverty, crime, and school Failures are nowadays frequently blamed on drugs like crack and heroin. In another parallel with the nineteenth century, abstinence ("just say no") and the utopian wish for truly effective prohibition are held up as the solutions to urban problems. Billy Sunday’s panacea, quoted earlier, of solving America’s economic and social problems through alcohol prohibition remains alive in the dream that effective drug prohibition and a rigorous war on drugs can now solve the problems of America’s poverty-stricken, urban neighborhoods. The result is that the political conditions for drug policy reform today are more like 1900 - when the prohibition movement was growing - than like 1933 when prohibition was repealed.

Another difference, as we discussed earlier, was the crucial role of the Great Depression in turning the political and economic elite against prohibition. With food riots and protest marches making headlines, popular discontent clearly helped shape the political context in which decisions about repeal and alcohol policy were debated. Despite all our contemporary crises, we are not yet facing the equivalent of the Great Depression. Even an economic catastrophe would not necessarily soften attitudes about drug prohibition as it did attitudes about alcohol prohibition. The ratio of drug users to drug prohibitors in the population today is too small to expect any such sharp shift in public opinion, even if the economy continues to deteriorate.

During the 1920s, and especially the early 1930s, repeal advocates argued that ending prohibition would result in a windfall of revenues from taxes on alcohol sales and from money saved on enforcement. This generally did not come to pass, for the economic needs of a growing government in a deep depression were so great that the new revenue was quickly expended. Thus it cannot be automatically assumed that if drug prohibition were lifted, excise taxes on legal drugs and reduced enforcement costs would provide a fiscal boon for governments. With worsening federal and state deficits, much of this money also would be absorbed. Given the shamefully inadequate level of support now provided for drug treatment, however, it is still conceivable that revenues from taxation and licensing could finance the expansion of treatment, counseling, and education that any sound drug control system would require› (see Schmoke, 1990, and Hofstra Law Review 1990, for detailed proposals). In terms of the politics of reform, however, it remains unlikely that the potential fiscal advantages of repeal will by themselves move us toward significant change in US drug law.

The political and intellectual energy that fueled the repeal of alcohol prohibition came from outside the Democratic› and Republican parties, and the situation is little different today. In 1928, Al Smith campaigned against prohibition, but the Democratic party provided no leadership, organizational skills, or intellectual support for repeal. A few current political leaders have criticized the ill effects of drug prohibition, but almost all elected officials of both parties have appealed to the electorate by trying to prove only that they are more committed drug warriors than their opponents. Some politicians may join in opposing the war on drugs and working for decriminalization, but it remains unlikely that many candidates for national office will soon take leadership roles in a campaign for drug law reform.

It is thus abundantly clear that the current context for repeal of drug prohibition does not compare favorably with the context in which alcohol prohibition was repealed. Historical, demographic, cultural, economic, and political conditions do not seem especially conducive for any radical change in US drug policy at present.

We should note, however, that there are some signs of change. Many dissenting intellectuals have called attention to the immense costs, numerous casualties, and unintended consequences of extreme prohibitionist regimes like the current war on drugs (e.g., Nadelmann 1989a; Trebach and Zeese 1990; Goldstein et al. 1990; Jonas 1990). These include conservative publisher and writer William F. Buckley, Jr., Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, former Reagan administration secretary of state George Shultz, federal judge Robert Sweet, and, at the other end of the ideological spectrum, Harvard science professor Stephen Jay Gould, Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, the first major political leader to proclaim publicly his support for decriminalization. In addition, a growing number of state legislators, federal judges, and even some police chiefs have openly criticized drug prohibition and urged consideration of repeal (e.g., Galiber 1990; Schuler and McBride 1990). The views of these prominent individuals have been echoed in periodicals such as the Economist, the Nation, Harpers, the New Republic, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

Opposition voices have also taken institutional form. The Drug Policy Foundation in Washington, DC, for example, has since 1987 published reformist newsletters and books, produced a regular television show on which experts debate alternative drug policies, and held a series of international drug policy reform conferences. There is as well the ongoing research on decriminalization and other alternative drug control regimes of the Princeton Working Group on the Future of Drug Policy, an interdisciplinary group of experts from across the United States, which convenes quarterly to develop long-range options for a postprohibition future. An international conference on drug legalization also was held last year at Stanford's Hoover Institution, one of a dozen such conferences on campuses across the nation in the last few years.

Although all this does not yet constitute a grass-roots movement for fundamental change in our drug laws, nevertheless the list of credible critics of drug prohibition who advocate some form of drug regulation regime has grown surprisingly long and their arguments have gained a certain momentum. By showing the full social costs and questionable efficacy of unquestioning support for a regime of prohibition, and by exploring possible alternatives, the critics may help shift the political climate within which drug policies are given shape and force.

A consensus has emerged among dissenters and drug warriors alike on at least one point: supply-reduction strategies like prohibition have inherent limits, so the future lies in demand reduction. Even Drug Enforcement Agency officials now admit that interdiction will never be capable of halting the flow of currently illicit drugs. One need not be a free market economist like Milton Friedman to understand that criminalization is the sine qua non of black market profits, and that these will continue to hire people into the illicit drug trade. Thus, a variety of unlikely bedfellows has concluded that any future success in combating drug problems must center on reducing demand.

The use and abuse of drugs cuts across the social boundaries of class, race, gender, and region. However, incidence and prevalence studies have shown time and again that the most serious and sustained drug problems are those found among the inner-city poor. According to surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, almost all forms of illicit drug use among the broad middle and working classes had been stable or declining before the latest drug war was launched in the spring of 1986. The hard-drug problems that persist, and that animate both public concern and public policy, are those of the impoverished - precisely those individuals who have neither a stake in conventional life to keep them out of trouble with drugs nor the resources to obtain the treatment and social services they need to break away (Waldorf, Reinarman, and Murphy 1991). In short, it is among the growing ranks of the impoverished that we find both the strongest demand for and the most serious problems with illicit drugs.

When it comes to the issue of how to reduce demand, there is little consensus. Advocates of drug prohibition regimes often tacitly assume that underlying economic and social problems have little to do with drug problems; they tend to see strong drugs and weak individuals as the cause. Public health professionals know that "environment" is just as important as "agent" and "host" and have often supported alternative policies that speak to such underlying causal mechanisms. Other advocates of alternative control strategies assume that decriminalization coupled with expanded education and treatment will be enough. We are not so sure. The prohibitionist strategies, which have imprisoned hundreds of thousands of mostly young black males, only exacerbate the hardships faced by them, their families, and communities, thus helping to ensure continued or per-haps expanded demand. Decriminalization could help create the conditions for a radical reduction in the crime and violence of the illicit drug trade as well as for the development of more effective public health policies. By it-self, however, decriminalization does not offer an adequate response to hard drug abuse among the urban poor.

In September 1988, at the height of US efforts to persuade Latin American countries to reduce their production of cocaine, a Bolivian journalist wrote in the Sunday New York Times that interdiction to reduce supply as a means of reducing drug use can never succeed. He too suggested that the United States must work on reducing demand, and concluded by calling for "a Marshall Plan for cities" that would reduce the poverty and despair that are the source, if not the direct cause, of our worst drug problems.

The relatively low prevalence of drug problems in other industrialized democracies also suggests that such domestic reconstruction will be a necessary foundation for any effective drug control regime. Most Western European societies have lower levels of illicit drug use, abuse, and problems than the United States, largely because they have less inequality, poverty, and homelessness. E. L. Engelsmann (1990), head of Substance Abuse in the Ministry of Health of the Netherlands, recently made the same point at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC: "The Dutch prefer a policy of social control, adaptation, and integration to a policy of social exclusion through criminalization....Instead of a war on drugs, we prefer to wage a war against underdevelopment, deprivation, and low socioeconomic status" (also see Henk 1989).

Most Western European nations have been more successful than the United States in combating poverty with family allowances, full social and health services, and a welfare system that meets the basic needs of their citizens. There, as well as here, the heaviest abusers of hard drugs are still from the lowest strata in society. However, Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Finland, and t Norway all have a markedly smaller proportion of their citizenry living in poverty than does the United States, and markedly fewer drug problems.

Even if the context for drug policy reform were to shift and some form of a decriminalized drug control regime put in place, the underlying problems of the urban poor would remain. Without significantly improving schools and housing, eliminating homelessness, and providing universal medical care, well-paying jobs, and expanded delivery of other social services, our most serious drug problems will persist. The recent spread of both the sale and use of crack, for example, occurred despite an overall decline in all other forms of illicit drug use (Reinarman and Levine 1989). In part this is because the conservative social policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations have produced a sharp decline in the already tenuous quality of life of the poor. Instead of a Marshall Plan for the cities, the United States has been working under what might be called a Dresden plan - reduced social and health programs, urban blight, and bulging prisons.

Someday, Americans may, as Edward Brechet predicted, look back on drug prohibition as most people today look back on alcohol prohibition as a mistake. In the twentieth century, a dozen major scientific commissions in Britain, Canada, and the United States have recommended alternatives to drug prohibition. The United States is the only nation where these recommendations have been so consistently ignored (Trebach 1989;

Trcbach and Zeese 1990). For starters, these recommendations should be more widely discussed and better understood in the United States. The experiences of other nations and cities - notably The Netherlands and Liver-pool - also provide living examples of drug policies that are more humane and, because they are linked to better social policies, more effective The full range of such alternatives to current drug policy should be studied and debated - from futuristic visions to pragmatic reforms that could be implemented immediately (Nadelmann 1989a; Hofstra Law Review 1990; Trebach and Zeese 1990).

We have shown that the United States is not yet in the position with regard to drugs that it was with alcohol in the 1920s and 1930s. We have al-so suggested, however, that there are a number of important lessons about future drug policy that may be learned from the postrepeal alcohol control system. We think the growing tanks of the peace movement against the War on Drugs and the broader public health community would do well to mine this policy vein for new approaches that blend some form of decriminalized drug control with expanded health ,and social services.