With Prohibition in the United States, we discovered another interesting effect: heavy-handed restriction of alcohol lead to a surge in violent crimes and government corruption. It got so bad, that the original proponents of the 18th amendment joined with others to overturn it only 13 years later. It's worth pointing out how we've tried to "ban" alcoholism before.
There are two different issues: whether Prohibition's benefits outweighed it's costs, and whether regulation of alcohol use is fundamentally illegitimate. When people invoke the "victimless crime" trope, they are talking about the latter. But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.
Put another way: why are we seemingly okay with banning alcohol use for people who have had a DUI but we wouldn't be okay with banning masturbation or gay sex even for convicted felons? Because the latter are truly victimless activities. Substance use is, in contrast, an activity that creates risk to the public but is hard to regulate without major side effects. So targeted bans in substance abuse could be effective while overcoming th enforcement side effects of a gener ban, and would be legitimate because substance use isn't a "victimless crime."
> That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.
A common issue with regulation is that the regulators cannot be trusted to act with wisdom or moderation or honesty. One of Washington State's own prohibition enforcement agents became its greatest bootlegger [1], for example. Roy served illegal booze to politicians, police, and citizens alike, and was treated with kid gloves when eventually arrested.
This dilemma -- of how to design a regulatory program to resist capture by the people entrusted to execute it -- makes it very difficult for me to understand how you can just hand-wave past the question of legitimacy.
Put another way: There is a train on the tracks that is going to run into one person. You could switch the tracks and save the person, but the train will then run into 5 people. What do you do?
But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.
That's an enormous assumption that is being made. What about the social deadweight loss from a person's freedom and personal agency being diminished through substance bans?
Even the NCADV puts it at 85%, which is still under heavy dispute from researchers in the gender symmetry disciplines of IPV research. A 2010 CDC report still puts men much higher than this: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a...
