Paul Thomas: Spectacular foolishness of prohibition

This isn't an attempt at heavy-handed satire on National's social welfare policy; this is for real. A German woman faces cuts to her unemployment benefit because she refused to become a prostitute.

When Germany legalised prostitution two years ago, brothel owners who pay tax and employee health insurance were granted access to official databases of job-seekers. According to Britain's Sunday Telegraph, soon after the 25-year-old unemployed information technology professional declared her willingness to work night shifts in a bar, a job centre informed her that a prospective employer was interested in her "profile".

The prospective employer was a knocking shop. Its head of personnel (what used to be known as a pimp) invited the IT operative to jazz up her CV by adding the oldest profession in the world to the newest.

Under the German system, women younger than 55 who have been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job or lose their unemployment benefit. The Government considered making brothels an exception but decided it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars.

Which is perfectly understandable: governments have enough on their plates without the tiresome chore of drawing a nitpicking legal distinction between bars and brothels. And, anyway, are they really that different? Lets face it, both are establishments frequented by lonely, desperate men with low self-esteem in the hope of finding women prepared to have sex with them.

There's a certain dark pleasure in watching an idea being taken to its logical conclusion when the logical conclusion is spectacularly foolish, if not utterly deranged (except, of course, when the inevitable final destination is the concentration camp or the gulag, but in those instances derangement was there from the outset).

Because it has difficulty in knowing where to draw the line, political correctness often leads to such surreal situations as convicted murderers, who just wish that people would let bygones be bygones, invoking legislation intended to protect minorities from vilification.

Sport, too, is fertile ground, perhaps because it's a self-contained world whose elite citizens are single-minded to the point of daffiness.

Former New Zealand cricket captain (and coach of India), John Wright, became so fixated on the positioning of his hands that he glued his gloves to the bat handle, the idea being that it would prevent him unconsciously altering his grip during the course of an innings.

And remember the John Mitchell regime, seized by a desire to purge the All Blacks of flaky, dreadlocked individualists, picking 14 Cantabrians and a former Auckland Grammar head boy?

Perhaps the best historical example was the prohibition of alcohol in the United States between 1920 and 1933.

Dubbed the Noble Experiment by President Herbert Hoover, whose other achievement was the Great Depression, prohibition was the logical conclusion of the social engineering urge (which always works on the premise that if the masses won't become model citizens of their own accord, they should be coerced) coupled with American Puritanism's long-standing conviction that alcohol undermined public order and private morality.

The 18th amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of "intoxicating liquors". This was taken to mean spirits even by many of the amendment's supporters, but that wasn't enough for the ultra-wowsers who then pushed through the Volstead Act which defined intoxicating liquors as anything containing above 0.5 per cent alcohol.

The evangelist, Billy Sunday, now looked forward to an America "so dry she can't spit". Silly Billy.

When the 21st amendment ended prohibition, alcohol consumption a head was higher than pre-1920 and has never returned to pre-1920 levels.

But that was the least of it. After 13 years of bribes, pay-offs and turn-a-blind-eye money from the bootleggers and speakeasy operators, the police, the Judiciary and the political system were riddled with corruption. Institutional integrity and public trust in the system have never returned to pre-1920 levels, either.

Worst of all, organised crime had bulked up into the 400kg gorilla that America had learned to live with. At the height of his fortunes, Al Capone's annual income was estimated at US$2 billion in today's terms.

When Prohibition ended, the Mafia was well-positioned to diversify, for instance redeploying its fleets of trucks into the haulage business over which it exercises a malign influence to this day. Besides, as one door closes, another opens. There was always dope.

I once heard a man from the Economist sum up the illogic of prohibition thus: the American liquor industry, he said, spent, say, $2.5 billion on marketing to achieve a turnover of $6 billion of which $1.5 billion went in tax, while the marijuana industry turned over $6 billion without spending a cent on marketing or paying any tax at all.

As someone who in his time has been a smoker, a social smoker and a non-smoker (sometimes simultaneously), I'm instinctively opposed to the ban on smoking in bars and pubs. On the other hand, the tobacco industry's status - legal but increasingly disrespectable, harried by the health authorities and demonised by relentless propaganda, with every participant from the grower to the consumer taxed to the hilt - is pretty much the model advocated by those who despair of the damage done by the futile and spurious War on Drugs.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington author.