THE BREWER'S JOURNAL

New York, New York, USA

1 April 1918

(page 214)

Editorial Comment.

How Low is the Moral Level

of the American People?

Letter to the Editor.

Prohibition has created an underground traffic, as it always does; and the evils of this are immeasurable. Thousands of citizens are in league to defeat the law; are actually bribed by the law itself to do so, since the profits of the illicit trade become enormous, and the closer the prohibition, the more unreasonably big they are.

The absurdity of the prohibitionist contention is shown by the experience of London and other European cities. In London any householder or apparently responsible person can even buy any drug as easily as if it were cheese; and London is not full of raving maniacs, snuffing cocaine at every street corner, in the intervals of burglary, rape, arson, murder, malfeasance in office, and misprision of treason, as we are assured must be the case if a free people are kindly allowed to exercise a little freedom.
Or, if the prohibitionist contention be not absurd, it is a comment upon the moral level of the people of the United States which would have been righteously resented by the Gadarene swine after the devils had entered into them.

I am not here concerned to protest on their behalf; allowing the justice of the remark, I still say something to think about; to develop their minds; to fill them with ambitions beyond dollars’ to set up a standard of achievement which is to be measured in terms of eternal realities; in a word, to educate them.

If this appears impossible, well and good; it is only another argument for encouraging them to take all sorts of drinks and drugs they may be able to surreptitiously procure.—(Aleister Crowley.)