alcohol prohibition

Marc Emery Rally September 18th

Submitted by Freedom Lover on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 3:38pm
in

Location

Corner of First Street And Pitt Street
101 Pitt Street (Across The Street) Corner of First And Pitt St
Cornwall
See map: Google Maps
When: 
Saturday, September 18, 2010 - 11:30

The Event will be held at the corner of Pitt St and 1rst St. Depending on the amount of people who show up, we may walk up and down Pitt St. Or stay at the one location.

Please Note that I have informed the Cornwall Police and City Hall this
rally will be taking place. They said it was fine as long as there is no SELLING.

Anybody who decides to come I ask that you please abide by their rules as I don't want to see anybody hauled off to jail. Keep in mind we will be in public and not everybody smokes.

I hope to see you there!

An illegal substance sold legally

Submitted by Jacob Hunter on Mon, 05/17/2010 - 8:59am
in
By. Daniel Okrent, LA Times
 
"He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores," Daisy Buchanan said. "He built them up himself." To Daisy, this was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the wealth of her new neighbor, Jay Gatsby. To her husband, more knowing about the world beyond the boundaries of East Egg, it was evidence that Gatsby had made his money as a bootlegger.
 
Modern readers in the grip of F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose may not recognize the meaning of Tom Buchanan's insight, but Fitzgerald knew his contemporaries would understand. In 1925, when "The Great Gatsby" was published, the meaning of "drugstores" was as clear as gin: Those were the places you went to get medically prescribed alcohol, a legally acceptable source of liquor during all 13 years of Prohibition.
 
Sound familiar? To any modern Californian, of course it does. Read more »

The Chemist's War

Submitted by Jacob Hunter on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 9:48am
in

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.

By Deborah Blum
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Read more »

The Secret to Legal Marijuana? Women

Submitted by Jacob Hunter on Sat, 12/05/2009 - 2:06pm
in

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet

Why women have signed onto marijuana reform -- and why they could be the movement's game-changers.

In September, ladymag Marieclaire ruffled some feathers when it published a piece about women who smoke weed. But its most interesting effect was not the "marijuana moms" chatter it unleashed, and instead the fact that it brought to the mainstream media a more open discussion of the fact that women can be avid tokers, too.

Public acceptance of pot is at an all-time high, and the fact that women have drastically changed their attitudes may be what is most fascinating about the sea change in public opinion -- and policy -- regarding marijuana. In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap.

Read more »

We Tried A War Like This Once Before

Submitted by Ellis Worthington on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 11:37pm
in

The Washington Post
By Mike Gray
Sunday, April 12, 2009

In 1932, Alphonse Capone, an influential businessman then living in Chicago, used to drive through the city in a caravan of armor-plated limos built to his specifications by General Motors. Submachine-gun-toting associates led the motorcade and brought up the rear. It is a measure of how thoroughly the mob mentality had permeated everyday life that this was considered normal.

Capone and his boys were agents of misguided policy. Ninety years ago, the United States tried to cure the national thirst for alcohol, and it led to an explosion of violence unlike anything we'd ever seen. Today, it's hard to ignore the echoes of Prohibition in the drug-related mayhem along our southern border. Over the past 15 months, there have been 7,200 drug-war deaths in Mexico alone, as the government there battles an army of killers that would scare the pants off Al Capone. Read more »

Today's drug crimes similar to booze problems during Prohibition

Submitted by Ellis Worthington on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 9:45pm
in

Beaumont Enterprise
By LINDSEY WALKER
March, 27, 2009

As I read in the newspaper daily and listen to the television about the problems involved with drugs, the Mexican cartels and the people killed in Juarez, it reminds me more and more of Al Capone, Chicago and the Valentine's Day massacre.

My dad was an ardent Prohibitionist in 1918. When Prohibition was finally voted out, he was a strong supporter of its demise. His comment was that he had seen the law enforcement agencies of the country fall into a real pit of corruption. His position - and mine at the time - is not to prohibit but it is to control.

Regulation on the use of narcotics including marijuana would be somewhat akin to the present regulation of alcohol. Of course there are violations, but the enormous sums of money currently being spent on the street might well be applied to proper ends. Read more »

Prohibitionists win the battle but lose the war

Submitted by Ellis Worthington on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 5:29pm
in

Diboll Free Press

Local History
by Bartee Haile

Ax-swinging Rangers raided night clubs in Houston, Galveston and Austin on March 15, 1935, pouring bootleg beer down the drain and confiscating cases of hard liquor in the losing battle to keep Texas dry more than a year after the rest of country had fallen off the wagon.

The first attempt by Lone Star legislators to restrict their constituents' consumption of alcoholic beverages came in 1854, when the sale of spirits in quantities smaller than a quart was forbidden. Although this law was overturned two years later by the state supreme court, the Texas temperance movement gradually gained strength and influence over the next seven decades. Read more »

Enforcing Prohibition by the Drink

Submitted by Ellis Worthington on Mon, 03/09/2009 - 2:15pm
in

from the Contra Costa Times

Nilda Rego
Contra Costa Times Correspondent
Posted: 03/08/2009 12:00:00 AM PST

By the summer of 1926, Clyde Laird, deputy sheriff and investigator for the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office, was fighting a losing battle.

He headed the "dry squad," whose purpose was to enforce Prohibition. Laird made arrests. People were fined. Some even went to jail, but no sooner had Laird shut down one bootlegger when another popped up, and sometimes it was the one he just shut down.

Most people who broke the Wright Act (the California law implementing the national Volstead Act) didn't bother with a lawyer. They just paid their fine of $500 and went on to start the same business elsewhere. Joseph P. Henry, however, decided he would hire someone to plead his case: attorney Frederick Littleton. Henry was the operator of the pool hall in the San Pablo Hotel. Read more »

Syndicate content