"Not Guilty" in Medical Marijuana Trial..

[HiPointDem]

36. little-known fact: big corporations were against prohibition, and had a big role in ending it.

ON March 19, 1928, eight years into the reign of constitutional Prohibition, Pierre S. du Pont wrote a letter to William P. Smith, one of the very few people he ever addressed by first name. Du Pont was among the wealthiest men in the world, chairman of both his family’s chemical colossus and the du Pont-controlled General Motors Corporation. Smith worked for a less well-known enterprise that Pierre du Pont also dominated: the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.

“The object of the organization,” du Pont told his friend Bill, “is not merely the return of the use of alcoholic beverages in the United States.” He went on, “Another important factor is the tremendous loss of revenue to our government through the Prohibition laws” — the revenue once collected through taxes on liquor and beer. With the end of Prohibition, he wrote, “the revenue of the government would be increased sufficiently to warrant the abolition of the income tax and corporation tax.”

For today’s advocates of legalized, taxable marijuana — or new levies on, say, electricity use, baseball tickets or high-fructose corn syrup — it’s an appealing model. Some even believe that a tax on marijuana, which could be legalized by California voters this November, could lead to a reduction in the state’s income taxes. But the history of the intimate relationship between drinking and taxing suggests otherwise.... By 1910, as anti-alcohol forces were making a significant impact on American politics, the federal government was annually drawing more than 70 percent of its domestic revenue from the bottle and the keg. In those years before the advent of the income tax, only the tariff on foreign goods and materials provided a larger share.

The nation’s dependence on the alcohol tax created a vexing problem for the leaders of the Prohibition movement. As early as 1883, the editors of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s official newspaper coyly asked their readers, “How, then, will [we] support the government” if the sale of liquor is prohibited? The editors had a ready answer: an income tax, they wrote, was “the most just and equable arrangement ever made for the equalization of governmental burdens.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13okrent.html?pagewanted=all