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What Prohibition Teaches Us About Cannabis: The Alcohol Comparison Nobody Wants to Have · Bite Me The Show About Edibles

• 1:15
  Margaret: Welcome friends to episode 370, and today we are talking what Prohibition actually taught us.
• 1:21
  Margaret: The alcohol comparison nobody wants to have.
• 1:24
  Margaret: And I want to start with a number, and that number is 10,000.
• 1:31
  Margaret: That's the estimated number of Americans who died from poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.
• 1:39
  Margaret: Not from bad bathtub gin made by some amateur in a basement, from the alcohol the United States government deliberately poisoned on purpose as an official policy.
• 1:51
  Margaret: Because they decided if people were going to drink it illegally anyway, the government would make sure some of them died for it.
• 1:58
  Margaret: I didn't know this myself until recently.
• 2:01
  Margaret: And I bet a lot of you didn't know either.
• 2:04
  Margaret: We know prohibition as a costume party theme, flapper dresses, speakeasies, and a wink and a nod about how silly it all was.
• 2:11
  Margaret: What we don't talk about is how it was a public health disaster with a body count engineered by the same government that was telling everyone that it was protecting them.
• 2:23
  Margaret: So today we're doing the episode I've been circling for a little while.
• 2:29
  Margaret: I'm your host, Margaret, a certified gangier, a TCI certified cannabis educator, and I believe your kitchen is the best dispenser that you'll ever have.
• 2:37
  Margaret: Welcome to Bite Me, the show about edibles, the show where we're not afraid to talk about controversial things in a safe space.
• 2:44
  Margaret: So grab a snack and let's get into today's episode.
• 2:47
  Margaret: And if you're just joining us for the first time today, I'm so glad that you're here.
• 2:51
  Margaret: I hope you enjoy it and you come back next week.
• 2:53
  Margaret: New episodes every single Thursday.
• 2:56
  Margaret: And if you've been with me for a while, I appreciate you.
• 3:00
  Margaret: Thank you for being here.
• 3:06
  Speaker: So here's the compressed version of what prohibition actually was, because the details could eat this whole episode if I let it.
• 3:13
  Speaker: National alcohol prohibition in the United States ran from 1920 to 1933 under the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act that enforced it.
• 3:24
  Speaker: It didn't ban drinking, it banned the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol.
• 3:30
  Speaker: If you already had a bottle in your cabinet in January 1920, you could keep drinking it legally for the rest of your life.
• 3:36
  Speaker: The supply chain was the target, not the person holding the glass.
• 3:40
  Speaker: It came out of the temperance movement, which had been building for close to a century by the time it actually passed.
• 3:47
  Speaker: Real harms were part of that story.
• 3:49
  Speaker: Alcoholism was wrecking households.
• 3:51
  Speaker: Domestic violence tied to drinking was a documented and serious problem.
• 3:56
  Speaker: The people pushing for prohibition weren't cartoon villains.
• 3:59
  Speaker: A lot of them, especially the women behind the temperance movement, were responding to something dangerous happening in their homes.
• 4:07
  Speaker: And then the law passed, and none of what they wanted actually happened.
• 4:12
  Speaker: Drinking didn't stop, it just went underground.
• 4:15
  Speaker: And underground meant unregulated, and unregulated meant nobody was checking what was actually in the bottle.
• 4:20
  Speaker: That's how you get government facilities deliberately adding methanol, the kind of alcohol that causes blindness and death in small doses to industrial alcohol supplies.
• 4:32
  Speaker: On the theory that if drinking was dangerous enough, people would stop.
• 4:36
  Speaker: They didn't stop.
• 4:38
  Speaker: They kept drinking it.
• 4:39
  Speaker: An estimated 10,000 people died over the course of Prohibition from poison alcohol, some of it poisoned by bootleggers cutting corners, a meaningful amount of it poisoned by their own government.
• 4:50
  Speaker: Organized crime didn't spring out of nowhere either.
• 4:54
  Speaker: Prohibition built it.
• 4:55
  Speaker: Al Capone didn't get powerful because he was uniquely evil.
• 5:00
  Speaker: He got powerful because the government handed organized crime a business model with an entire adult drinking population of a country as a captive customer and zero legal competition.
• 5:12
  Speaker: When something people want gets criminalized instead of regulated, someone still supplies it.
• 5:18
  Speaker: The only question is who and under what rules?
• 5:20
  Speaker: And Prohibition answered that question by handing the entire market to the people willing to operate outside the law.
• 5:28
  Speaker: By 1933, it was over.
• 5:31
  Speaker: The First Amendment repealed it, and alcohol went back to being a legal tax regulator product almost everywhere in the country.
• 5:39
  Speaker: It should be noted that this is why people say the war on drugs doesn't work.
• 5:43
  Speaker: Somehow, despite the decades-long war on drugs in the United States, drug consumption is still prevalent, and maybe this is as controversial as it might be, where Portugal's model of decriminalizing all drugs might make more sense.
• 6:00
  Speaker: I'm of the opinion that if you were to decriminalize drugs like heroin, that there wouldn't be a floodgate opened of people who are suddenly interested in trying heroin.
• 6:10
  Speaker: Oftentimes that comes from a whole other set of issues or problems in society, not because it was just illegal.
• 6:19
  Speaker: That's the topic for a whole other podcast episode.
• 6:23
  Speaker: So here's where I want to slow down a bit because this is the part that gets skipped when people turn prohibition into a punchline.
• 6:28
  Speaker: Lesson one.
• 6:30
  Speaker: It just decides who controls it.
• 6:35
  Speaker: The demand for alcohol in 1920 didn't go anywhere when the laws changed.
• 6:39
  Speaker: What changed was who was allowed to meet that demand.
• 6:43
  Speaker: Legal producers with quality control and oversight got replaced by whoever was willing to break the law with none.
• 6:50
  Speaker: That's not a moral statement about anybody involved.
• 6:52
  Speaker: It's just what happens to a supply chain when you make the top of it illegal and leave the demand at the bottom completely intact.
• 7:00
  Speaker: Lesson two, unregulated production is measurably more dangerous than regulated production.
• 7:06
  Speaker: This is the one that actually matters for how I think about dosing in edibles, so stay with me.
• 7:11
  Speaker: It's not that alcohol itself became safer the day prohibition ended.
• 7:15
  Speaker: It's that regulated alcohol became testable, labeled, and consistent, and the bootleg alcohol was none of those things.
• 7:22
  Speaker: A drink from a licensed distillery in 1919 and a drink from a bathtub in 1925 were not remotely the same level of risk, even though both of them were technically alcohol.
• 7:33
  Speaker: The danger wasn't the substance, the danger was the absence of any system checking what was actually in it.
• 7:40
  Speaker: And lesson three, prohibition didn't stop people from making it themselves.
• 7:45
  Speaker: It just made doing so an act of quiet defiance.
• 7:48
  Speaker: Home brewing exploded during prohibition.
• 7:51
  Speaker: People made wine in their bathtubs, beer in their basements because the law banning commercial alcohol never actually banned a person making a personal supply for their own household in most cases.
• 8:01
  Speaker: And even where it technically did, enforcement against home production was basically nonexistent compared to enforcement against commercial bootlegging.
• 8:09
  Speaker: People took control of their own supply because the legal one had been taken away from them.
• 8:14
  Speaker: And it turned out to be one of the hardest things to actually stop.
• 8:17
  Speaker: Three lessons, none of them are actually about alcohol specifically.
• 8:20
  Speaker: They're about what happens anytime you try to criminalize a substance that has a meaningful chunk of the population that already wants it.
• 8:27
  Speaker: I think you can see where I'm going with this.
• 8:30
  Speaker: That brings us to the comparison nobody wants to have.
• 8:33
  Speaker: Where the parallel holds up, the black market for cannabis didn't disappear because it was illegal.
• 9:13
  Speaker: It got bigger and it got run by people with zero incentive to test potency, screen for pesticides, or tell you honestly what you were buying, because there was no regulatory structure making them do so, and no legal consequence for lying to you.
• 9:27
  Speaker: That's Prohibition's lesson two, playing out exactly the same way.
• 9:31
  Speaker: An illegal supply chain has no reason to be an honest one.
• 9:35
  Speaker: And that's not to say that there weren't honest people who were growing cannabis and who were doing it properly, but there were definitely people who might have been selling cannabis that had powdery mildew or other molds and toxins in it because they didn't want to take the financial hit.
• 9:52
  Speaker: Where it holds up even more is the people who paid the price for cannabis prohibition were not evenly distributed.
• 9:58
  Speaker: Enforcement of cannabis laws in the U.S.
• 10:00
  Speaker: has fallen disproportionately on black and Latino communities for decades, despite roughly equal rates of use across racial groups.
• 10:07
  Speaker: That's not a side detail.
• 10:09
  Speaker: That's the actual mechanism by which prohibition did its damage.
• 10:13
  Speaker: The same way alcohol prohibitions poisoning programs specifically targeted the poor, since wealthier drinkers could afford better bootleggers and safer sources.
• 10:22
  Speaker: Prohibition of any substance rarely lands evenly.
• 10:26
  Speaker: It lands on whoever has the least power to push back.
• 10:30
  Speaker: And home growing, I think about this one a lot, honestly.
• 10:34
  Speaker: Growing your own cannabis at home, the way I do, the way many listeners do, is directly in the lineage of home brewing during prohibition.
• 10:41
  Speaker: It's the same instinct.
• 10:43
  Speaker: If the legal supply has been taken away or made needlessly expensive and complicated, people take back control of the thing itself.
• 10:50
  Speaker: That's not rebellion for its own sake.
• 10:52
  Speaker: That's just what happens when you tell people they can't have something that they've decided you're going to have anyway.
• 10:58
  Speaker: And growing your own cannabis is just fun.
• 11:00
  Speaker: Here's where I want to be honest because pretending the comparison is airtight would just be lazy in this show.
• 11:06
  Speaker: We don't do lazy.
• 11:08
  Speaker: Alcohol and cannabis are not the same substance with the same risk profile.
• 11:12
  Speaker: And treating them as interchangeable does a disservice to both.
• 11:16
  Speaker: Alcohol is a lethal overdose threshold.
• 11:20
  Speaker: Cannabis, as far as the current research shows, effectively doesn't in the same way that alcohol does.
• 11:26
  Speaker: Alcohol is more consistently linked to violent behavior in the research than cannabis is.
• 11:32
  Speaker: Alcohol withdrawal can be medically dangerous in a way that cannabis withdrawal generally isn't.
• 11:38
  Speaker: These are real differences.
• 11:40
  Speaker: And if you're building a legalization argument on cannabis and alcohol are basically the same thing, you're standing on a weaker foundation than you think you are.
• 11:48
  Speaker: What actually transfers cleanly from prohibition to cannabis isn't these two substances are equivalent.
• 11:55
  Speaker: It's this.
• 11:56
  Speaker: Prohibiting a substance doesn't make it disappear, it makes the supply chain around it unaccountable.
• 12:02
  Speaker: And unaccountable supply chains hurt people who have the least power to protect themselves from them.
• 12:07
  Speaker: That lesson holds regardless of which substance you're talking about.
• 12:12
  Speaker: The specific danger profile of the substance itself is a separate question and a real one.
• 12:18
  Speaker: I'm not going to pretend it away just because it makes for a tidier episode.
• 12:21
  Speaker: So why does any of this matter to you on a random Thursday standing in your kitchen deciding whether to make a batch of gummies?
• 12:28
  Speaker: Because you are, in a very real sense, doing what people did in their basements 100 years ago.
• 12:32
  Speaker: You're taking a substance that was pushed underground by policy, not by science, and you're bringing its production back into your own hands, where you control what goes into it, how much, and who it's for.
• 12:44
  Speaker: That's not a small thing.
• 12:46
  Speaker: That's the same instinct that kept home brewing alive through 13 years of US federal prohibition.
• 12:53
  Speaker: And it's the same instinct that makes home cannabis production quietly, stubbornly persistent, no matter what the legal landscape looks like in your particular corner of the map.
• 13:04
  Speaker: Your kitchen is the best dispenser you'll ever have.
• 13:07
  Speaker: And part of why is exactly this history.
• 13:10
  Speaker: When you make it yourself, you're not depending on a supply chain that has ever, at any point over the last century, been reliably honest with the people buying from it, whether that supply chain was legal or not.
• 13:22
  Speaker: You know what's in it because you put it there.
• 13:25
  Speaker: Take control of your high life, not as a slogan, as the actual documented thing people have been doing every time a substance they wanted got legislated out of their reach.
• 13:36
  Speaker: And I do recognize I say that in Canada, as someone who enjoys federal legalization, but do note it is still not legal to grow your own cannabis in the province of Quebec, except for medical purposes.
• 13:51
  Speaker: And I'm not really sure of the details of how that looks, but if you just wanted to grow a plant in Quebec, that is the one province you still can't do so legally, which means you have to rely on that regulated supply chain.
• 14:03
  Speaker: And in the interview I did with Michael De Villiers, who wrote the book Buzzkill, the corporatization of cannabis.
• 14:09
  Speaker: Sometimes those big players that you assume you can trust because it is regulated by a body like Health Canada, sometimes they let you down.
• 14:20
  Speaker: I don't think prohibition and cannabis prohibition are the same thing.
• 14:27
  Speaker: I think they're two very different stories that rhyme in places that matter the most.
• 14:32
  Speaker: Who gets hurt when something people want gets pushed underground?
• 14:35
  Speaker: And who profits when nobody's allowed to ask questions about what's actually in the product?
• 14:41
  Speaker: Two things I keep coming back to is that prohibition ended and alcohol went back to being legal, tax regulated, and somehow that's remembered as common sense now.
• 14:51
  Speaker: Nobody seriously argues we should go back to 1925.
• 14:54
  Speaker: Well, we spent decades treating cannabis prohibition as if it were a completely different kind of question when a lot of the underlying mechanics were the same ones that failed so obviously with alcohol when the Constitution was amended twice in 13 years to fix it.
• 15:11
  Speaker: So the harder question is this alcohol prohibition ended with a clean repeal, one amendment undoing another.
• 15:18
  Speaker: Cannabis legalization has happened in patches, state by state, in some respects, province by province, with people still sitting in prison in some places for something legal a few miles away in another.
• 15:30
  Speaker: If the lesson of prohibition was that a fast, clean end serves people better than a slow, uneven one, what do we still owe the people who are still on the wrong side of that unevenness right now?
• 15:42
  Speaker: I don't have a tidy answer for that, but I would love to hear yours.
• 15:48
  Speaker: Send me a note, DM, or join us in the Bite Me Cannabis Club where we will talk about these things more deeply.
• 15:56
  Speaker: That's it for this week, my friends.
• 15:59
  Speaker: I'm your host, Margaret.
• 16:01
  Speaker: And until next week, stay curious and stay high.