this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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If you learn more about the effects of alcohol, it is arguably as bad as, if not worse than, cigarettes or marijuana. Ethanol is literally poison that damages liver, and it impedes with the electrical signals between brain cells. The Temperance movement had a point to ban alcohol.
The only reason we are not going to ban alcohol again, is because banning it had proven to have more dire consequences. Gangsters took monopoly of the black market. And tainting black market alcohol to deter people from drinking alcohol is dangerous, just as bootleggers also made their own alcohol but the process is unregulated.
There seems to be some percent of the population in every geography of the planet living, working, survivng as part of this army, contra-band. They are the most vicious supporters of capitalism because they can't survive outside of capitalism. They are as right wing as it gets, and due to their activity they are constantly in contact and exchange relationships with state armed forces.
Capitalism can not survive without this reactionary army, terrorizing people in worker/poor neighborhoods to not organize and compete with their power, and will act as supporters of police/army in case there was an uprising.
Capitalism can not survive without this para-military force of gangsters, thugs, traffickers, smugglers, mafia, neo-nazis, islamists, ... you change geography and they have a different name, but the role is the same. In the 1960s in the US they became so actively brutal it was almost revealed that there was no clear border between state agencies and mafia .. who was doing the killing, the infiltrating, the subversions, .... they got sloppy! Too much evidence behind.