Sisyphus in Greek mythology was a king who believed that his craftiness surpassed that of the gods. As punishment in the afterlife by the gods, he was given the task of rolling a heavy boulder up a hill, but the boulder was enchanted, and would roll away from him and back down the hill before he ever got it to the top, such that his work was endless and unreachable.
Societal improvers constantly think they can outsmart society, outsmart human nature, and outsmart causality. Case in point -- the War on Drugs.
US society has tried a war on drugs before, most recently with Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. Prohibition initially made a small dent in the rate of alcohol use (we rolled the boulder a little ways up the hill), but the alcohol use rate had returned to normal before prohibition ended. Society found ways around the ban on alcohol -- doctors were allowed to prescribe booze (typical prescription reading "take 3 ounces every hour for stimulation until stimulated"), complete with special alcohol prescription pads (sounds like controlled substances today, doesn't it...) And filling prescriptions for alcohol was what helped Walgreen's pharmacy expand from 20 stores in 1 city to 550 across the US in less than 10 years.
And meanwhile, because Prohibition didn't end the citizen's desire for alcohol, it simply steered all that money spent on alcohol directly to those who were willing to live a life outside the law. Prohibition didn't create the Mob, but the wealth steered to the mob by Prohibition allowed the Mob to expand from a marginal part of society to a household name with tentacles reaching deeply into many aspects of american life and politics. Society was rewarded for its belief that it was smarter than the gods by a task that was endless because it was impossible to complete.
We learned our lesson for all of 40 years before deciding that we once again were capable of outsmarting human nature, society, and causality, and launched the War on Drugs in 1971. Since then, Central American and Mexican society has been partially destroyed by the wealth this impossible task has steered to those willing to live outside of the law, we have 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prisoners, and this ill conceived boondoggle is destroying American freedom through work-arounds such as civil asset forfeiture, "knock and talk" raids like we used to endure under British rule, militarization of our police force, rising numbers of innocents shot by no-knock SWAT raids, and mandatory sentencing.
All without making an ounce of dent in the rate of drug use. The boulder has slipped away and is back at the bottom of the hill again. Why is it so difficult for our society to learn that we cannot outsmart ourselves?
