Bullies force halt to vote on allowing alcohol sales in Pine Ridge

[Virginiá]

Dry counties don't work. We tried it nationwide and it was a huge epic fail. It lasted about six months on a Reservation I lived on and was also abandoned for being an epic fail. It works even less than marijuana prohibition.

It only doesn't work because white assholes like you are selling alcohol right next door.

Why are you being so nasty?

[Virginiá]

Dry counties don't work. We tried it nationwide and it was a huge epic fail. It lasted about six months on a Reservation I lived on and was also abandoned for being an epic fail. It works even less than marijuana prohibition.

It only doesn't work because white assholes like you are selling alcohol right next door.

Why are you being so nasty?

Because I've lived near Indian Reservations my whole life and I've seen the destructive impact that alcohol has on these communities firsthand.  I'm pretty offended that brtd, who purports to be a progressive, can hold a position of "lol prohibition is teh badz" and blame the problem on the Natives, when it's the whites living in Whiteclay outside their jurisdiction that are causing this crisis.

There are legitimate discussions to be had about whether prohibition is the right approach here, as Sol mentioned, but adopting a "prohibition never works" position based on completely unrelated evidence is ignorant and doesn't contribute to the conversation at all.

well, okies, but it'll be difficult to foster a legitimate discussion if we all start getting unnecessarily hostile with each other.

As for the topic at hand, in this case it's hard for me to say that continuing to ban alcohol is wrong, despite my anti-prohibitionist leanings. With this country's / their current situation, their only real, viable option seems to be to continue banning it.

[Virginiá]

I might be the only one here who's actually lived on a Reservation*. It went dry for about six months. Not long. Why? Because it didn't do crap. There was just as much drunkeness and no tax dollars and it was fueling organized crime. Rez gangs would send people up to Bismarck, stock up and liquor, and then come down and bootleg it like it was the 1920s again. My parents admitted to actually buying "imported" beer a few times, though they mostly would just stock up while visiting Bismarck.

Whiteclay, while rather shady, still at least prevents this from occurring. If it didn't exist people would just stock up in Rapid City and bootleg stuff in from there. So why not just allow it on the Rez itself, have the industry a bit more under control and keep the tax dollars?

Above all that though, I don't want to be a hypocrite. I drink alcohol. I shop at liquor stores. South Minneapolis has liquor stores galore and I don't have a problem with them. So wouldn't it be hypocritical for me to say that somewhere else shouldn't have them?

Prohibition, more so for illicit substances, is generally only effective if it's applied universally. That means every state, every country and all other territories, and has to be applied thoroughly, without corruption. Otherwise, it's like water and leaky pipes. The pressure builds up and water finds a way out.

Policy towards things society doesn't like has, in America, tended to lean heavily towards just banning things we find undesirable. However, the result is we only "ban" it from public view and the problem then moves out of view and remains a problem nonetheless. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature by our leaders. Realistically, you cannot ban a vice. One of the reasons we don't change is because society clearly isn't ready to accept this and clings to a system that rots society from the inside.

[Virginiá]

This is a very Ameri-centric worldview.  There are plenty of societies that have successfully eliminated drugs and alcohol.  The problem here isn't hooman nature, it's white assholes profiteering off the alcoholism in marginalized native communities.

It is a view shaped by life as an American and the fact that many, many Americans want these drugs and other activities. It's different if you are in a society that has a lot less desire for such things. Fixing this on the individual level in America would require some very complex, vast social engineering. Same could be said for many other countries.

However, it doesn't change my main point about prohibition.