History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

The Lessons of Prohibition: Repeal Day drives home the folly of the Drug War - Reason Magazine:

"This Friday, Dec. 5, is the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day, the day America repealed its disastrous alcohol prohibition.

Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives' grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably.

It did reduce overall consumption of alcohol in the U.S., but that reduction came largely among those who consumed alcohol responsibly. The actual harm caused by alcohol abuse was made worse, thanks to the economics of prohibitions.

Black market alcohol was of dubious origin, unregulated by market forces. The price premium that attaches to banned substances made the alcohol that made it to consumers more potent and more dangerous. And, of course, organized crime rose and flourished thanks to the new market created by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.

So hospitalizations related to alcohol soared. And so did violent crime. Corruption flourished, as law enforcement officials in charge of enforcing prohibition went on the take, from beat cops all the way up to the office of the United States Attorney General. Even the U.S. Senate had a secret, illegal stash of booze for its members and their staffs.

...There's no question that drug prohibition has been every bit the failure alcohol prohibition was. Nearly 40 years after the CSA passed, we have 400,000 people in prison for nonviolent drug crimes; a domestic police force that often looks and acts like an occupying military force; nearly a trillion dollars spent on enforcement, both here and through aggressive interdiction efforts overseas; and urban areas that can resemble war zones. Yet illicit drugs like cocaine and marijuana are as cheap and abundant as they were in 1970. The street price of both drugs has actually dropped—dramatically—since the government began keeping track in the early 1980s.

...As the drug war has failed, the government merely claims more powers to fight it more aggressively.

Eliot Ness and his colleagues raided supply lines, manufacturing hubs, and warehouses, but alcohol consumption was still legal. You didn't have armed-to-the-teeth cops breaking down the doors of private homes the way they do now for people suspected of consensual drug crimes. During prohibition, doctors could prescribe alcohol as medication. Today, federal SWAT teams storm medical marijuana clinics and terrorize their patients, thanks to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which allowed the federal government to prevent a dying woman from possessing medical marijuana, solely for her own use, to treat the symptoms of her illnesses, even though the voters of California had determined that she should be left alone.

When he first visited the United States in 1921, Albert Einstein wrote of America's ban on booze: "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law... For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."

That's as true today as it was then."