Substance Related Crime

In order to gauge the impact of attempts at prohibitionism, it will be beneficial to look at the historical and social background of alcohol and drug use. Life before Prohibition and the "War on Drugs" will yield valuable insights into the origins of today's obsessive fears about substance use and abuse. In fact, it will be seen that substance-related crime has increasingly become a problem in direct proportion to society's attempts at control.

America's urban centers had experienced a gradual decline in the rate of serious crime over much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. That trend unintentionally was reversed by the efforts of the Prohibition movement. Thornton cites the following statistics in his history of Prohibition: "Th

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Italians, and German communities could scarcely be imagined apart from their breweries and taverns (459). Such stereotyping lead easily to racism--in the American mind, the vices of urban dance halls, houses of prostitution, and saloons were all too easily reduced to two causes: immigrants and their alcohol. If European immigrants brought vices in the form of alcohol to America's shining shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese immigrant laborers were said to have brought opium with them. In North America, in the U.S. and Canada, anti-Asiatic sentiments were running high. In fact, in Canada, anti-narcotic criminal laws were initiated in 1908, largely directed at opium smoking among Chinese laborers. As has already been shown, Mexican farm workers, Caribbean dock workers, and now, Chinese opium smokers, were responsible for the importation of drugs, whereas European immigrants were only saddled with taking too many drinks at the local pub. Drugs and the people who use them have always existed at the darker fringes of society than alcohol and those who may merely drink too much. In Canada, subsequent modifications to the 1908 anti-narcotic laws provided ever harsher penalties and fewer legal prot
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Approximate Word count = 1931
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)