"There oughtta be a law..."
I've long thought that to be one of the most un-American, and un-traditional, of traditional American expressions. It's the absolute antipathy of traditional American, freedom-oriented, "mind your own business" values.
For that reason, I commend you to the latest interview at Prodos.com Internet Radio, on Prohibition.
Yes, the horrid Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933 and alcohol prohibition is no longer in force (federally, at any rate) throughout the United States. But I shouldn't have to remind you of the "War on Drugs" or the existence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, or of attempts to regulate tobacco or ban smoking, or that many drugs require prescriptions to begin with.
At the interview site, Prodos invites you to click on a Google search for the phrase "should be banned." When I ran that search this evening, Google returned over 139,000 hits.
There oughtta be a law, indeed.
On the other hand, the Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, Genovese, and Profaci families, among others, found Prohibition to quite profitable indeed, didn't they?
Posted by Craig Ceely at July 31, 2004 06:46 PM