REMEMBERING PROHIBITION

And talking about how I or it feels – and having lived under recreational drug prohibition for my entire long life, I have often wondered how it must have felt to wake up on that dire morning of January 16, 1919 and face the reality there was no more legal alcohol. Now our pals at Delancey Place fill us in…

"The streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before trans- porting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways 'with haggard faces and glittering eyes.' Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year's Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city's hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharf side saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of 'bottled sunshine' liberated from 'cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places.' Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness. ..."There were of course those who welcomed the day. The crusaders who had struggled for decades to place Prohibition in the Constitution celebrated with rallies and prayer sessions and ritual interments of effigies representing John Barleycorn, the symbolic proxy for alcohol's evils. No one marked the day as fervently as evangelist Billy Sunday, who conducted a revival meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday's enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. 'The reign of tears is over,' Sunday proclaimed. 'The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” From Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent (Scribner)

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The secret word is Dry