This afternoon, I interviewed Ken Burns—the mastermind documentarian behind the Civil War series, the man who familiarized more Americans with the term “Little Bull Run” and Lincoln’s complicated relationship with emancipation than all the American history textbooks ever printed.

His new documentary is about booze prohibition and will air in early October. During the interview, I asked Burns whether he thought the failures of That Prohibition (booze) contained any lessons about This Prohibition (drugs).

His answer:

Of course. The parallels are endless. The folly of enforcement, the impossibility of enforcement, how enforcement itself becomes its own center of corruption, the absurdity of ‘victimless crime.’ And there are many other parallels as well: lack of civil discourse in our conversations, the demonization of immigrants… parallels that are extraordinarily contemporary. They’re almost scarily contemporary, as modern as anything that’s going on today—and I mean today. In today’s headlines.

He added that That Prohibition vs. This Prohibition is not a one-to-one comparison and that ending drug prohibition would require other kinds of solutions than ending booze prohibition—and I agree. But the Prohibition series begins with a Mark Twain quote that lays a duo foundation between the This and the That:

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.

Take a look at the trailer for Prohibition. Substitute “drugs” for “alcohol,” and every line of it still works:

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

7 replies on “Ken Burns, America’s Historian, Supports an End to Drug Prohibition”

  1. Just watched his doc on Huey Long, fantastic. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a charismatic, corrupt populist on the national stage to add at least a lil variety to the mix of uncharismatic corporate shills.

  3. Yeah, them tea-partiers are just like prohibitionists. They’re trying to grab power so they can leave you alone.

    Seriously, the cognitive dissonance of the Left between the message of prohibition (overarching rule by the State is a failure) and the message of the Tea Party (overarching rule by the State is a failure) is astounding.

  4. @4: I will never believe that the Tea Party cares anything about freedom until they drop the bigots. And that’s not gonna happen, because then they’d be tiny. Talk about your cognitive dissonance.

  5. “Take a look at the trailer for Prohibition. Substitute “drugs” for “alcohol,” and every line of it still works:”

    Alcohol is just another drug.

  7. “An’ here I sit so patiently
    Waiting to find out what price
    You have to pay to get out of
    Going through all these things twice.
    Oh, Mama, can this really be the end, To be stuck inside of Mobile
    With the Memphis blues again.

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