Salman Khan provides a pretty good history and timeline of Prohibition.
Prohibition and the War on Drugs. “War on Drugs” is a term coined by the Nixon Administration.
For further reading on Prohibition, check out this list and this one. Harry Anslinger is the father of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Let’s call this the Harry J. Anslinger file.
1914, Harrison Tax Act. Cocaine and heroin were restricted to medical use only in 1914. “The Harrison Narcotic Act, establishing the foundations of federal drug law enforcement, was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on Dec. 17, 1914.”
Since the Harrison Act was a tax law, responsibility for enforcing it was left to the Treasury Department. Under an assistant secretary in charge of collections and revenues was lodged the predecessor agency of the Bureau of Customs, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. While customs officials and the Coast Guard kept control of border smuggling, the Bureau of Internal Revenue undertook enforcement of the Harrison Act. Within its ranks was something called, for lack of a more precise name, the Miscellaneous Division, whose regulatory responsibilities were to include control over oleomargarine, adulterated butter, filled cheese, mixed flour, cotton futures, playing cars, and last but not least, narcotics. It was in these humble surroundings that the first federal narcotics agent was born on the day the Harrison Act became law, March 1, 1915.
1920, Prohibition or “War on Alcohol”. What I find interesting is that most of the media focus on gangsters of the period, not the economic developments, not the laws, but gangsterism.
This here is an excellent article on how the IRS uses tax evasion to secure convictions against gangsters. Here, Armstrong focuses on what the Feds and the IRS did to Al Capone.
However, the presiding judge, James Herbert Wilkerson (1869–1948), informed Capone he was not bound by any such deal. Capone then changed his plea to not guilty. Wilkerson was not about to let Capone off easy despite the fact they could not charge him with a serious crime. The prohibition was repealed by FDR 3 years later. On October 18, 1931, Capone was convicted after a mock trial, and on November 24, Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison, fined $50,000, and charged $7,692 for court costs, in addition to $215,000 plus interest due on back taxes. The six-month contempt of court sentence was at least served concurrently.
Capone was confined to the Cook County Jail and of course a political case of this nature had all appeals denied. Capone entered the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, serving his sentence there, and was then transferred to the infamous Alcatraz. It was alleged that Capone was denied medical treatment which is really on par for high-profile cases. On November 16, 1939, Al Capone was released after having served seven years, six months, and fifteen days, and having paid all fines and back taxes. His health deteriorated greatly during his confinement. Immediately on release, Capone entered a Baltimore hospital for brain treatment. He was released and moved to his Florida home, an estate on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay near Miami. He never recovered and died with his family due to a stroke and pneumonia on January 25, 1947. Such is the fate of high-profile cases in America.
This was interesting.
If it were not for the INCOME TAX, Al Capone would never have gone to prison. Even Prohibition was a failed experiment that actually made the Mafia. The Mafia was respected among the Italian community because they would even counterfeit food ratios during World War I to ensure the community was fed and did not starve.
The ending paragraph puts a whole new spin on who the American mafia as well as who the Italian mafia were.
The American Mafia, however, did not rise to power until the prohibition and they too began as an admired protector of the people.
I didn’t realize that David Mamet wrote the screenplay for the 1987 Brian de Palma movie, The Untouchables. Though a visually luxurious movie as was The Godfather, the latter does a better job to portray middle-class Italian-American families, I think.
“Scarface” was the nickname that the press gave to Al Capone.
Al Capone received his famous nickname after getting into a fight in 1917. Capone insulted a woman at the Harvard Inn in Brooklyn, NY, and her brother slashed Capone’s face as retribution, giving him several scars. Capone was embarrassed by the deformity and often tried to hide the scars when he was being photographed. He also claimed he received them during the war even though he never served in the military. When Capone became a famous mobster, the press started calling him Scarface, which he hated. His criminal colleagues called him “Big Fellow,” while friends called him “Snorky,” another word for “spiffy.”
Equally interesting was to learn how Tony Montana, the Scarface hero in Brian de Palma’s 1983 film, “Scarface,” got his name is that the writer, Oliver Stone liked the San Francisco 49ers’ great quarterback, Joe Montana.
Tony Montana’s name came from the screenwriter’s love of professional sports. Oliver Stone was a huge San Francisco 49ers fan, so he decided to name the titular character in his movie after his favorite football star, Joe Montana. Joe Montana won four Super Bowls and was named Super Bowl Most Valuable Player three times (the first one to ever do so). In the film, Tony is called “Scarface” only one time — and not in English. When Tony is threatened with a chainsaw by Colombian gangster Hector, the rival calls him “cara cicatriz” in Spanish, which means Scarface.
1922, Jones-Miller Act prohibited the importation of cocaine.
1924, Anti-Heroin Act, the law that outlawed domestic production of heroin.
1925, International Convention Relating to Dangerous Drugs.
1931, Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs.
1933, April 7. Few more details on the event.
Enjoy some more Eastside Brewery placards.
The Los Angeles Brewing Co. opened in 1897 on the banks of the Los Angeles River, using the water from the river as an ingredient in their beer. Twenty years later, a German immigrant and brewmaster purchased the brewery, renaming it Eastside Brewery, and it grew to one of the largest in the country. During the Prohibition years, Eastside Brewery survived by producing near-beer and soft drinks. When Prohibition was lifted, Eastside had trucks stocked with alcohol ready to drive out of the brewery to begin sales one minute after midnight. Actor Walter Huston gave a speech and Jean Harlow broke a bottle over the first truck to drive out. Eastside was purchased by Pabst in 1948, the Eastside label was discontinued, and Pabst continued brewing their beer in the Los Angeles-based plant until 1979.
That’s Siolver Carioso standing next to an Eastside delivery truck.
1937, Marijuana Tax Act. Cannabis was outlawed in 1937.
1968-1974, Nixon Administration. Nixon’s “War on Drugs” came in 1971, coined in a speech he gave. A handful of laws passed prior to Nixon’s tenure. Mark J. Perry points out that incarceration rates since the passage of Nixon’s War on Drugs has increased by 500%. Perry points out that
But as John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and Assistant for Domestic Affairs, revealed in 1994, the real public enemy in 1971 wasn’t really drugs or drug abuse. Rather the real enemies of the Nixon administration were the anti-war left and blacks, and the War on Drugs was designed as an evil, deceptive and sinister policy to wage a war on those two groups
WWII also had an interesting role to play in drug policy. In her book, We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire (2014), Suzanna Reiss dates the start of the global war (on drugs) to WWII.
“Drug addiction is not immorality, it’s not your brain, it’s your cage.” Johann Hari
“During the Vietnam War, about 20% of American troops were using drugs regularly.” The public was worried that all these vets would return as addicts. It didn’t happen. At all. You put kids in a foreign land, where the prospect of death just rose to 50% or greater, it’s no wonder why kids were regularly doing drugs. Once they were out of that cage and returned home to their family, friends, and pleasant things of life, they had no inclination toward drugs.
Find more by Johann Hari here at Tom Woods’ podcasts. This video interview is pretty good on drug addiction, Prohibition, and the War on Drugs.
This was an interesting detail comparing Anslinger’s treatment of Billie Holiday with Judy Garland, who was also a heroin addict.
One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy… the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.
1971, Nixon launches “War on Drugs.” Mandatory sentencing begins. Mandatory Minimums began in the mid-1970s, following Nixon’s War on Drugs.
San Gabriel Tutor 