publius
Member
But you’ve missed *my* point...that the violence was caused by criminal organizations that already existed.
Not so much that I missed it as that I don't believe it. Why were the criminal organizations NOT so violent before alcohol prohibition? Why did they revert to less violence after prohibition ended? The answer seems obvious to me: the existence of a lucractive, easily exploited black market makes existing criminal organizations more powerful and more violent.
I'm just going to take a wild guess that you've never had family members who suffered from alcoholism. I have. None I've known killed any cops, but they did all kinds of antisocial and uncharacteristic things, and they were addicted.Your typical honest hard-working citizen did go get an automatic weapon and start killing cops simply because he couldn’t get a drink.
But addicting drugs *do* cause honest hard-working citizens to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise.