Nashville's metro daily ran a thought-provoking guest piece recently ("Prohibition wasn't the cure-all that Tennessee wanted") commemorating the 75^th anniversary this month of the state's ratification of the 21^st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Sociologist David J. Hanson soberly summed up the hallucinatory Utopian optimism that intoxicated so many otherwise down-to-earth, commonsensical good folk in Tennessee and elsewhere as they gamely agreed to play along with the Volstead Act, pretended to swear off Demon Rum and cheerfully set course with the rest of the nation on "one of the biggest policy debacles in American history."

"The popularity of national prohibition in Tennessee reflected the fact that most residents expected it to lead to improved health, less violence, greater safety, increased public morality and a better environment for young people," wrote Hanson.

They were profoundly wrong, of course, having been coaxed into quaffing down a "noble experiement" brewed up by the ideological progenitors of today's Drug Warrior class. As a general legislative rule of thumb, when idealistic ends-justifies-the-means progressivism is served over religiously-inspired might-makes-right fundamentalism, a really bad trip is about to ensue: Lives get destroyed, freedom devoured, public health compromised, property rights violated and confiscated, law and morality undermined, great swaths of social fabric shredded asunder, etc. Wrote Hanson:

With easy, untaxed money to be made, police and sheriffs were routinely bribed. Politicians were also widely on the take. The revelations of such corruption lowered respect for the law, which was widely violated.

The rampant graft and corruption caused by Prohibition created a deep lack of respect for law. It became fashionable to flout the law, especially among young people, and many people became alarmed at the decline in public morality.

Prohibition also led to the pattern of infrequent but very heavy drinking.

People didn't go to a speakeasy to have a leisurely drink with a meal, but to guzzle alcohol while they could.

Bootleg alcohol was carelessly made and often contained toxic substances such as creosote, lead and embalming fluid. Consumers sometimes suffered paralysis, blindness and even death. This led some drinkers in the state to switch to hair tonic, mouthwash and illegal drugs.

Today, in and around jurisdictions still flirting with alcohol prohibition - like some American Indian nations, for example - these problems persist. Similarly, as explained in the pages of National Review more than 20 years ago, the unintended but unavoidable consequences of black-market economics propagated by the war on drugs did much to perversely facilitate the popularization of evermore health-wrecking and wellness-debilitating substances, like crack cocaine and home-cooked methamphetamine. (Call it bathtub gin all over again.)

Steps are being taken - small ones, but progress nonetheless (sort of) - in both Congress and at the state level to confront and rectify the U.S. government's institutionalized inability to learn obvious lessons from staggering blunders.

Pathetically, though - as with alcohol prohibition - politicians won't simply recognize the errors of their foolish ways or reject the folly of their flawed ideas for sounder judgment: It'll take pure, uncut bureaucratic greed for that to happen. Already the budding medical marijuana industry is yielding $100 million a year in aboveboard tax take for the State of California. There is, of course, plenty more green where that came from.

Wrote George Mason University economics department chairman Donald Boudreaux in a column last summer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (later reprinted in Reason):

(I)f the history of alcohol prohibition is a guide, drug prohibition will not end merely because there are many sound, sensible and humane reasons to end it. Instead, it will end only if and when Congress gets desperate for another revenue source.

That's the sorry logic of politics and Prohibition.