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Originally Posted by Xenophon
I can't speak for Harmon, but the basic premise of American government and society is that the Federal government has exactly and only the powers granted it by way of the constitution -- and no rights whatsoever!
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Well, actually, you
are speaking for me when you say things like that!
And that goes for much else that I find you saying...
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I note that last time we decided to outlaw a class of substances at the Federal level, we passed a Constitutional Amendment to do so -- and then passed another one when we decided we were wrong. I fail to see what is so different about the various "illegal substances" being fought in the "war on drugs" that they can be outlawed without a similar amendment. But, of course, I am not a lawyer..
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That's a very interesting question. It led me to sit down & read portions of a legal treatise I own called Blakemore on Prohibition, which I keep on my wine & liquor rack - a sort of
mememto bibere...
What is contained in that now fortunately obsolete volume does not directly answer your question, but from what I read my guess is that the answer lies in politics more than in law, plus a drift in the legal environment about the powers of government, toward greater inherent power, in the last hundred years. Astonishingly (at least to me) there was a serious argument about the validity of the amendment itself, ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court.
I think that the situation is explained by a lot of things, including the change in the extent to which we now accept the dominance of the federal government in our lives. But one factor probably had to do with what was being attempted. Prohibition outlawed the importation & sale of liquor at one fell swoop. Drugs, on the other hand, were subjected to creeping regulation - tax them, register them, and gradually force them out of the hands of the public. To accomplish the swoop required Draconian action. But creeping toward the same thing with drugs, incrementally, just required people to accept a series of encroachments over time, to the point where most people conceded the power to the government.