We can see a pattern in the apparent incoherence of the prohibitionists’ position if we recall that the war on drugs, like all the preceding prohibitionist crusades in American history (some of them still continuing), amounts to a defense of bourgeois WASP conventions against persons and classes deemed less respectable. So, SSRIs, yes, ecstasy, no; Benzodiazepines, yes, heroin, no; a pleasant cocktail party, yes, reefer madness, no; and so forth. Everything turns on the sort of people who tend to consume the substance.
The better sorts have been waging war for centuries to keep the rabble in line. The self-anointed "respectable" people live in constant anxiety that their beloved way of life faces mortal menace from the disorderly masses, who may be disinclined to toe the line drawn for them. As David Wagner has written in The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, "the Victorian and Progressive Period movements [to ban alcoholic beverages and tobacco cigarettes, among other things] were characterized by what scholarly observers consider an exaggerated . . . notion of their ability to change behavior, by a huge faith in government's ability to regulate every aspect of private life, and by a strong ethnocentric belief in the correctness of white, Protestant, middle-class social norms." The Progressive Era ended, thank heaven, but this twisted puritanical obsession endured.
Their forefathers helped bring fascism to this country even before the term was coined.
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