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Comment by zanethomas | Hacker News Reader

strange that a constitutional amendment was required to ban alcohol, but none was required for other drugs

It wouldn’t require an amendment today. Sadly the courts have supported a huge increase in the federal government’s police power over the years.

It didn't require an amendment in the past either.

The Supreme Court could have chosen not to interpret the Commerce Clause so broadly to say that not engaging in interstate commerce affects interstate commerce and therefore counts as interstate commerce (IIRC that started with wheat, not drugs), in which case most federal drug laws would not apply unless the activity actually involved interstate commerce. Then an amendment would be needed.

Yes, had things been different they would have been different. I'm not sure what the point of that statement is, honestly.

I don't think an amendment was required. Alcohol could have been banned at the time through legislation, it just would have been easier to reverse and maybe less universal.

That’s not correct as far as I understand it. Prior to Wickard v. Filburn the federal government did not have the power to ban substances (since it isn’t explicitly specified in the constitution). If congress had passed a law doing so, that law would have been considered unconstitutional. Wickard v. Filburn is obviously ridiculous and should be overturned, but it never will be.

The way I interpret a decision like that is the court saying "yes the government does have the power to do this and it always has, it is specified in the constitution and if you thought otherwise you've been reading it wrong." It's sort of a pointless philosophical distinction, but I wouldn't say the government didn't have that power before the decision, I'd say they did but they never tried to use it (unless the court was overturning a previous decision).

I'm aware that the Supreme Court sometimes completely changes its mind in a matter of decades, so it's possible a legislative prohibition would have been struck down 20 years before Wickard v. Filburn, but it's also possible the court would have come to the same unanimous decision. I don't know anything about legal history so if there's some obvious reason the 1918 court would have ruled differently then I apologize.

> The way I interpret a decision like that is the court saying "yes the government does have the power to do this and it always has, it is specified in the constitution and if you thought otherwise you've been reading it wrong."

That is indeed the theory but it’s completely fictional.

The amendment was a goal by prohibitionists to ensure the law wouldn't be easily repealed. To their chagrin, they didn't realize the will of the people in banning their ridiculous amendment.

Prohibition obviously reflected the will of the people—it’s impossible to amend the constitution without supermajority support. The Volstead Act was approved by overwhelming majorities of both houses, and then ratified by 46 of 48 states.

It wasn’t “ridiculous.” It was one of the first things women did with the vote. It probably would’ve worked if it hadn’t been for Irish and Italian immigrants.

I think there's more to it than "immigrants love their alcohol so much they started whole criminal enterprises." It's probably coincidental that the biggest names in illicit alcohol during that era happened to be Italian crime family names.

In the south there were so many bootleggers that they used to race each other around tracks to see who had the fastest car. This would eventually become Nascar.

I think it's more accurate to say that there was overwhelming support for Volstead from people in power who were swayed by the narrative that alcohol was draining families of resources and dis-inhibiting otherwise good men from hitting their wives and children. But there were also a lot of people who didn't let alcohol ruin their marriages and family relationships, and those people would eventually get the act repealed.

Prohibition wasn’t repealed because we determined “alcohol isn’t so bad.” To this day, alcohol remains tremendously damaging to women. 70% of sexual assaults involve alcohol use by the perpetrator. 55% of domestic violence incidents involve alcohol use prior to the incident. Obviously that doesn’t exculpate the perpetrators. But those bad people will exist no matter what—alcohol pours fuel on the fire.

We repealed prohibition because it proved unenforceable. And Irish and Italian immigrants had a tremendous amount to do with that, both because of their participation in organized crime and because of their cultural acceptance of alcohol. (To this day, the divide between people who supported temperance and those who got it repealed lives on in who serves grape juice at communion and who serves wine. Even a century of integration later, there’s a marked difference between evangelical Protestants and Catholics in terms of regular alcohol use.)

After all, it’s not like banning alcohol is impossible. Alcohol use is extremely restricted in many countries around the world.

Is German or English beer culture new? They may be culturally less prone to skirting the law than Irish or Italians (want to stress the word culturally here), but I don’t really see how we can attribute it to a cultural difference in the acceptance of alcohol.

Temperance was an outgrowth of religious movements that occurred within American Protestantism in the late 1700s and through the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement. The seeds of this were sown back in Europe (John Wellesley for example) but those groups like Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers who opposed alcohol (and still do) had a lot more influence in America than they did back in Europe. And since the country was new they had a greater ability to reshape the culture.

So the relevant cultural difference is between these American Protestants, who had been diverging from Europe for 100+ years, and immigrants from continental Europe, who hadn’t experienced that cultural change.

Speaking of Appalachian bootleggers, my great grandpa was one. There are ruins far in the woods outside my childhood home when you can see the old infrastructure and a pile of rusty cans that used to be 10 ft high. It's mostly disintegrated now. My great grandpa retired from it when he was visited by some rival Italians who wanted to have exclusive access to him. He was offered the choice to retire or serve them exclusively so he gave up the business and went back to farming.

Everyone reading this who isn’t familiar with Wickard v. Filburn please look it up on Wikipedia. Greater awareness of it would be really helpful. It is a blatantly insane interpretation and a huge amount of power at the federal level is built on top of it.

Even if you don't enjoy that interpretation of

"To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;"

You cannot deny that "among the several states" can be interpreted to mean congress can regulate commerce in the states.

I’m not sure what you mean? I think that pretty clearly refers to commerce between states. How are you interpreting it differently? They just really casually and implicitly gave the feds the power to regulate all interpersonal transactions within each state? I think they would have said that explicitly if they meant it, no?

"Among the several states" does not conclusively disallow congress from regulating intrastate commerce in my opinion. How does "among" restrict the regulation only to things going between the states? What definition of "among" limits the rest of the clause to only certain interactions involving commerce flowing through multiple of the states?

If I regulate commerce specifically in the state of Virginia, which is a member of the set of states, IMO I am regulating commerce among the states. The rest of that section of the constitution is all about how the Government's laws should be equal across all states, ie there is no favoritism, so that also leads me to believe this could be about keeping the government fair, rather than limited.

Keep in mind a huge point of the Constitution superseding the articles of confederation was that interstate activities were a pain in the ass and trade treaties were a dumpster fire. Giving congress final say over trade in the Union is absolutely compatible with that. It was not a document about keeping the Feds out of the business of the states. It was entirely about giving the federal government MORE power over the affairs of the states because the previous federal government was basically useless and at the whims of powerful state governors who absolutely did not want to stop being the kings of their little fiefdoms.

It was not and is not required! Many states and locations locally banned alcohol before and after prohibition. What did take a constitutional amendment was ending prohibition but only because it was implemented through a constitutional amedment.

It took a constitutional amendment to do it at the federal level. Congress would not have been able to pass such a law constitutionally prior to Wickard v. Filburn.

Alcohol was used by more people. The governmental play that had to be carried out to make the people tolerate the tyranny was minimal.

Remember it’s not about what a piece of paper says the rules are - it’s what you can get away with in power.

They weren't bans originally. They were huge taxes that nobody could afford to pay. The bans came later after the supremes gave carte blanche to the feds.

It wasn't required. It was a moonshot that worked.

We used to be a republic, now we are a democracy.

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