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Amanda
Crocker: Why did
you decide to write a history of booze?
Craig
Heron: I never
intended to write this book, but once the field
opened up to me, I realised this book had to be
written. I was working on an exhibition on the
subject for a small heritage organisation and I was
also trying to move ahead in my own work on the
leisure time activities of working people. One of
the things I wanted to know more about was drinking
patterns and the impact of prohibition on drinking
patterns, and it was extremely hard to find
anything. There is a huge gaping hole on library
shelves in this section in Canadian social history.
I thought it would be useful to map the terrain,
partly to encourage people to do more work on the
subject by laying out the whole landscape and
seeing what it looked like. However, the more I got
into the subject, the more I realised that this was
a book that should have been written years ago. So
many issues and themes touched just about every
imaginable part of Canadian history: the economy,
culture, popular culture, social structures, social
conflict, politics and the formation of the state,
and on and on. All of these things had a river of
booze flowing through them.
AC:
The title of your book is Booze, but you
cover much more than the history of beer, wine, and
liquor in Canada. What makes the history of booze
important to our broader understanding of Canadian
history?
CH:
Well, starting with the very word itself, booze, I
chose it because it encapsulated the two
diametrically opposed views about the consumption
of alcohol. On one hand, booze was celebrated and
you were likely to use the word in a slightly
naughty way to suggest that this was a pleasure
that should be enjoyed but had a certain
disreputable element to it. On the other hand,
booze was just spat out of pursed lips by people
who despised it and saw everything that was wrong
with it. So, it was symbolic of quite different
notions of the way people should spend their time
and their money and organise their lives as
industrial capitalism took hold, as cities grew up.
The people who wanted to
shut down drinking or restrict it in any way were
usually concerned in much larger ways with
reconstructing the whole culture to make it one
based much more on self control and self discipline
and, in the fullest sense, a more sobered and
temperate approach to living. And when it became
necessary to do that through legislation, they were
ready to push for it. The temperance movement was
very much identified with the consolidation of a
new dominant class and a new urban middle class in
the mid-nineteenth century that saw the need for
these kinds of cultural changes as part of a whole
transformation in the way that society worked.
And of course, booze had
enormous implications for gender. It had a lot to
do with ways that men understood their masculine
identities and expressed these identities through
gathering together to consume alcohol in particular
spaces that were theirs and theirs alone. Women
were far less likely to drink than men and when
they did drink, they drank much less. For men it
was about self-expression, about establishing their
identity as men. Masculinities that were associated
with drinking varied considerably: from the more
genteel man sipping his claret with his buddies in
their exclusive club to the men who left work after
six o'clock on a Saturday night to head home after
six days of work, stopping off to have a few pints
with the boys that they worked with. But, in either
form, it was seen as a masculine privilege that men
had a right to as providers, as breadwinners.
In the nineteenth century,
a set of industries were put in place to supply
this thirst; these became quite major economic
interests in society, which produced one of the
earliest and most popular mass consumer goods.
Those companies were at the cutting edge of new
advertising policies; at the turn of the twentieth
century, they were already using lifestyle
advertising, trying to encourage people to drink
for reasons linked to lifestyle.
Out of that mass commerce
in alcohol, governments discovered a wonderful
source of revenue that staved off income tax for
generations; it made up a huge proportion of
government coffers in the nineteenth century.
Indirectly we can say that while the workers didn't
have to pay for the cost of things because they
didn't pay income tax, in fact, in their drinking
patterns, they supported most of the state
apparatus. I'm exaggerating slightly but it was a
huge contribution to revenues.
AC:
The book uses examples from right across the
country. Is the history of booze similar across
Canada?
CH:
There are distinct regional differences. You write
anything about Canadian social and cultural history
and you immediately realise there is no national
history unless it's organised by the federal
government. The thing about Canadian prohibition,
as opposed to American prohibition, was that it
came in by province rather than nationally. In the
United States, prohibition was brought in through
an amendment to the constitution. In Canada, it was
one province after another that introduced it and
then repealed it at its own pace. So here it was
all staggered. But clearly, prohibition was related
to the rhythms and the social developments of
particular regions.
The regional differences
became one of the most interesting things to try to
untangle. The easiest one to identify is the
experience within the province of Quebec, where the
very large Catholic population was never as
interested in cutting off access to alcohol the way
Protestant Canadians were. But that pattern played
out in every Catholic community across the country.
Catholic communities in the prairies and Catholic
Acadian regions in the Maritimes invariably voted
against prohibition when they got the chance. And
Catholic leaders across the country were more
likely to be hesitant.
But then it gets even more
complicated. British Columbia has almost as strong
a record of being opposed to temperance and
prohibition as Quebec. They had virtually no
temperance movement, no local option law to allow
single municipalities to vote themselves dry before
provincial prohibition, and immediately after the
war, they ended prohibition, almost as quickly as
Quebec did. Their story is one based on a much
large number of working men, a province where the
Catholic population was not as significant as the
Anglican population, a group that was also
extremely hesitant about state imposed morality and
much more tolerant of drinking on a moderate basis.
The provinces that had very
strong evangelical Protestant movements were the
places more likely to shut down and shut down
early. It gets even more interesting when you
consider that the longest and most successful
prohibition experiments in the country were in the
Maritimes. Prince Edward Island introduced
prohibition first in 1900; it didn't repeal it
until 1948. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were the
last provinces other than PEI to roll back
prohibition. And part of that, I think, has to do
with a very deep sense, a growing sense of regional
disparity, rooted in the Maritime countryside.
These were primary producers trying hard to survive
in a difficult environment, not particularly well
off, and alcohol was always a luxury commodity for
them. It was not basic to their diet, at least in
the modern period, and it became almost part of an
official regional culture that in order to survive
they needed this restraint, this publicly imposed
restraint. The irony that runs right through this,
across the country, but is so evident in the
Maritimes, is that it was also one of the leading
centres of bootlegging and rum-running. So,
although officially booze was denounced and you
couldn't get access to alcohol in any public
places, it was always available from the bootlegger
down the way. There were always gatherings behind a
barn somewhere where a guy got together with his
farmer friends to drink. So, contradictions run
deep.
AC:
What makes the Canadian experience with alcohol
unique?
CH:
The Canadian experience is quite striking because
only a handful of countries in the world ever
completely outlawed the retail sales and
consumption of alcohol: Canada, the United States,
and three Scandinavian countries. Other countries
cut back on the sale of spirits but not beer and
wine so that sets us apart in the world.
In our relationship to the
United States, one of the key differences was that
the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which
brought in prohibition in the United States, was
completely prohibitive; American alcohol production
had to shut down completely along with all the
taverns, clubs, and stores, whereas in Canada, the
producers were allowed to keep producing. This is
one of the things that made us one of the world's
leading bootleggers; the Canadian government never
for a second questioned the right of brewers and
distillers to export.
It also didn't care whether
it was exported to the United States. Producers
weren't supposed to export it there, but just to
cover their tracks, most of the rum-runners would
claim-as they were headed out of Windsor in a
little rowboat-that they were headed for Cuba. A
few hours later, they'd be back from Cuba with yet
another order that they wanted to ship. So, there
was a whole game that went on. Eventually, by the
mid- to late-1920s, it was clear that the producers
were supplying Canadian bootleggers as well as
Americans.
One of the short answers to
why no one ever wrote a book like this before is
that, like all things having to do with policies
administered at the provincial level, it's so
uneven everywhere that it's just a nightmare to
sort out. One of the reasons why there are national
drinking cultures in other countries is because the
state has set so many of the parameters. So those
two factors really stand out in our comparison with
the United States: we kept producing alcohol
through prohibition and the alcohol regulation was
not state but provincial policy.
Smaller differences also
come to mind. For example, I'm sure I'm going to be
asked, "Why is Canadian beer different from
American beer?" From what I've been able to find, I
think the answer is that lager beer, which was
brought and disseminated by German immigrants and
which became the central defining form of beer in
the United States by the end of the nineteenth
century, came to Canada but never made the same
impact. Canadian brewers stuck much closer to
British brewing traditions. And probably, because
of the huge influx of British immigrants that
continued coming to Canada, unlike the United
States, well into the twentieth century, there was
a willingness to brew beers that would be more
familiar to that large drinking population. By the
1920s and 1930s, we were brewing beer that had a
taste-it wasn't just bubbles. We did a good job of
getting rid of those distinctive tastes after the
Second World War.
AC:
Why should non-Canadians take an interest in the
history of booze in Canada?
CH:
I think the similarities in the history of alcohol
worldwide make any history of alcohol useful.
Alcohol was part of every culture except that of
the Polynesians and the Native people of northern
North America before Europeans arrived. For some
reasons, that anthropologists haven't been able to
sort out yet, there was no pre-contact alcohol and
drinking of alcoholic beverages in North America or
among Polynesians, but everywhere else they made
some kind of beer or wine or whatever. So,
throughout the world in a variety of ways but also
in remarkably similar ways, people have dealt with
how to integrate alcohol into their lives and how
to deal with issues around the expression of
pleasure. One of the key issues becomes how much
pleasure should you indulge in and what are the
dangers of indulging too much in that pleasure. So,
the book ended up having a framework of pleasure
and danger. That seems applicable to any culture
that has alcohol in it.
AC:
Your book contains more than a hundred photos and
illustrations. Do any stand out for you as
particularly interesting or unique? Do you have any
favourites?
CH:
I have a lot of favourites. The one that to me
captures a huge number of the issues and themes in
the book is the one that faces the title page. It's
a mock family portrait that I found in the
Seagram's archives and I really don't know why it
was made. It was perhaps a novelty postcard. But it
has a family of four; a mother and a younger son
are sitting in the foreground in a formal way
facing the camera. Everybody's dressed up. Behind
them, stand dad and his eldest son sharing a drink
of Seagram's. In every way this photo captures the
essence that booze was a male-dominated experience,
that it was engaged in surreptitiously-the naughty
looks on the men's faces suggest that they knew
that they were violating something-but probably
also that the mother and child in front knew what
was going on and they were kind of complicit. I
find that quite interesting.
Some of the pictures of
saloons are just remarkably revealing. They tell a
huge amount about the world of working-class
drinking before the arrival of prohibition. One of
my favourite details is a trough on the front of
the bar, literally on the floor at the bottom of
the bar next to the spittoons, which is a urination
trough. I had read about this in American saloons
but I thought this couldn't have happened in
Canada. Then I looked at these pictures and there
is unmistakably a trough where, presumably in their
very masculine way, guys decided that they didn't
have to go out back, they could just relieve
themselves right there in front of the bar. It's
horrifying, but it tells you something about the
atmosphere of these places.
Two images stand out as my
favourites. The first is a photo of a Native man in
western Canada, probably a cowboy, pouring himself
a glass of liquor or beer, and there's an
incredible power in the image. His absorption in
this activity is quite clear in the photo. But the
other one I found quite late into the process in
the New Brunswick archives. It shows two Catholic
brothers from a college in Caraquet, New Brunswick,
about a hundred years ago, out on a hunting trip
with two boys from the school who look to be about
age twelve or thirteen, and the brothers are
sharing their beer with the boys. The boys are
drinking directly from the bottle. You can see from
the glasses sitting on the ground that this is
unmistakably beer. And everyone seems to be having
a jolly time. To me, it was revealing of how this
masculine solidarity could actually exist within
the context of a Catholic school and, of course,
Catholics were much more tolerant of alcohol than
their evangelical Protestant equivalents.
AC:
What makes the history of booze different from the
history of any other consumer product?
CH:
In some ways, booze can be seen as just another
consumer product, especially initially. In fact, it
was one of the first mass consumer products and the
patterns of marketing booze were just extended
outward to other products. I think that it is
somewhat different from your average consumer
product in that it was primarily a product consumed
by adult men and it was such an important lubricant
for creating male solidarity and male
companionship. The fact that alcohol could
chemically alter the body and could lead to certain
kinds of social problems: short term ones like loud
drunkenness on a Saturday night or longer term ones
when people's obsession with or compulsion for
booze became a problem for their families, drinking
up precious family income and leading to assaults
on family members. It has ramifications that come
from excessive usage that not many other consumer
products have. Again, so much of that is about how
men incorporated it excessively. The story of heavy
female drinking is extremely limited. Hardly anyone
has written about it and it doesn't seem that even
social reformers were very concerned about it. It
was men. I think that those things set it apart.
And, of course, because of all those things, there
was scarcely any other consumer product, other than
tobacco, which is probably its counterpart in terms
of other consumer goods, that was as heavily
regulated by the state. You could sell almost
anything else if you were a grocer or a pharmacist.
Very little regulation of other retail products
compared with the regulation of the consumption of
alcohol.
AC:
You say in the book that "to write about booze is
to enter a minefield of controversy." What makes it
so controversial?
CH:
Booze is controversial primarily because of the
negative impact that too much alcohol has on people
and it is unfortunate (and this is one of the
things that I try to counterbalance in the book)
that for so long the predominant perspective on the
history of drinking was the negative view put out
by the temperance movement-that drinking was almost
invariably a bad thing for everybody and that
drinking alcohol was a slippery slope towards
serious social problems. I think that perspective
is deeply rooted and for understandable reasons. It
comes up most often in writings about the history
of women and the family and, therefore, often in
the work of feminist historians, historians of
women and the family, who quite rightly appreciate
that there were people who suffered because of
booze. There's a way of writing about the
consumption of alcohol purely as a wonderful,
joyful experience, a celebration and a
reaffirmation of values, and a way of finding
solace and compensation for all the bad things in
life. That's invariably a way of saying that men
had opportunities to drink. The question seldom
asked is: "At what cost to the womenfolk in their
lives?"
There's a great deal of
uncertainty about booze in our culture generally,
but certainly in historical writing, an ambivalence
about whether it was a good or bad thing to have
access to alcohol and how easy that access should
or shouldn't have been at any particular point.
Right down to the present. I wasn't sure how to end
the book and last year the premier of British
Columbia gave me an idea when he was caught driving
drunk in Hawaii. The public debate that swirled
around that was fascinating because the same issues
that I thought had largely been buried came to the
surface again. To me, what was noticeable was that
this was a man who had shown bad judgement in
getting behind the wheel of a car, and the
discussion was about him drinking too much. Those
are two totally different things.
AC:
So, how did you handle this tension between
celebration and condemnation in the book?
CH:
I think if there's a message in the book, it's that
there's a possible way of looking at booze that
involves coming up the middle between those extreme
positions. The evidence shows that the great
majority of drinkers, especially since the middle
of the nineteenth century, chose to drink because
it was part of the sociability of the gathering
they were in. There's a wonderful study of taverns
in Upper Canada, a doctoral thesis by Julia Roberts
at the University of Toronto. Her careful
investigation of the evidence about tavern-going
reveals not what it says in the temperance
literature, and which has been our predominant view
of drinking in Upper Canada, which was wild
drunkenness all the time. She found very little of
that. In fact, the diaries and records of
tavern-keepers suggest that it was pretty rare to
have somebody staggering into the streets
stone-drunk. Predominantly, people showed up to
spend time together, drank perhaps to get a buzz,
perhaps enough to get a bit tipsy, but nothing more
than that.
A hundred years later, in
the early twentieth century, a bunch of
Presbyterian and Methodist clergymen organized what
they called "preliminary social surveys." They went
to six Canadian cities to investigate social
conditions, just before the First World War. One of
things they did in some of the cities was undertake
a census of taverns. They sent little snoops out to
go into a tavern for 15 or 20 minutes and see how
many drunks there were and they kept notepads.
Well, these were folks who would never ordinarily
go near a saloon, so you can imagine that they were
not the most objective people in reporting. But
they were also more likely to identify people as
drunk than not drunk. And the remarkably small
percentage of drunken people they do find in the
last hour before closing on Saturday night, which
is when they go, is really quite striking. The
great majority of people, ranging from about 65% in
one of the sleaziest places to about 90% in
another, are not identified as drunk at all. They
haven't the time to get drunk.
So what I tried to do in
the book was to present the ways that people in the
past used alcohol and talked about, justified it,
or attacked it, and to write a historical
assessment of the validity of what they said. The
one thing that struck me again and again was that
the temperance perspective exaggerates the impact
of alcohol. Of course the industry itself tried to
promote heavy consumption and it exaggerated the
benefits of alcohol but that, it seems to me, is a
different kind of concern because the temperance
perspective was one with major political and social
ramifications. The argument that a drinker was
destroying his family every time he went into a bar
was simply, historically, not true in most cases.
But it's a balancing act.
At the end of the day, there will be people whose
experience with heavy drinking and what we've come
to call alcoholism might find that I've leaned too
far in the other direction, that this is a book
that's too sympathetic to drinkers. But that's not
what I wanted to say because I certainly do believe
that there are dangers in excessive alcohol
consumption. So I wasn't trying to justify alcohol
consumption, and it was, again, the international
comparisons that helped me get my moorings on this
subject. There are cultures in which drunkenness,
the act of getting drunk, is celebrated not feared.
The French, for example, don't understand why you
can't slide into a state of inebriation that you
just toddle off to bed from. The word enivrement in
French has all these higher connotations that are
lost in the word intoxication, which has poison in
the middle of it (toxic). We don't have a very
healthy attitude toward alcohol at the end of the
day. It's either something that we enjoy
surreptitiously or deny to each other or are
fearful of.
AC:
How do you handle the sensitive issue of alcohol
and First Nations people in the book?
CH:
I found that very difficult. During my research, I
found that writing on Aboriginal drinking was
either quite inadequate or hard to integrate
directly. There's a great deal of writing about the
first experiences, the first generations of Native
people who drank after the fur traders introduced
alcohol to them. I tried to look more closely at
the existing evidence to suggest that it was
actually not such a straightforward process of
degradation as the missionaries at the time were
suggesting. First Nations peoples integrated drink
into their spiritual lives in very specific ways.
The trouble is alcohol is never an independent
variable; it's always tied to other social forces
in society. Once it was tied to the colonisation
and the marginalization of Native people, then the
story starts to get a good deal more tragic because
people with limited resources and limited outlets
and who are also officially told they can't drink,
that it's illegal for them to drink, incorporate
alcohol into their lives and binges become the only
way of coping. When you're able to get some
alcohol, when you're able to stay out of sight of
the government agent on your reserve, then you get
drunk. More than one anthropologist argues that
this is a kind of defiant cultural act, that
getting drunk is a Native response to the
expectations of white society.
The problems are that this
explanation doesn't take account of the devastation
that alcohol has wrought on the bodies of Native
people, who have much higher levels of alcohol
related health problems, accidents related to
drunkenness, and so on. And the damage that it's
done to their communities. So, not surprisingly,
part of this upbeat story is that many Aboriginal
communities have gone dry and refused to allow
alcohol in their communities and also that in the
last twenty years in particular, there's been an
upsurge in Native treatment programs that try to
use traditional Native spiritual practices like the
sweat lodge to help alcoholic Native people to
overcome their problems. But it's definitely a
challenge because the "drunken Indian" remains a
strong cultural stereotype throughout Canadian
history right down to the present, especially in
western Canada. But there's no reason to believe
that that's anything more than a parallel
experience to something that went on in white
society amongst people whose material resources and
opportunities were really limited. It's part of
that whole culture of oppression they find
themselves living in.
AC:
What do you see as the most significant changes in
alcohol consumption over the last three centuries?
What remains constant about the social and cultural
meaning of booze?
CH:
The predominance of men remains constant and the
way in which men have used booze as a social
lubricant and to try to build solidarity.
The biggest change comes
around the middle of the nineteenth century. It
began in the early decades of the century and was
really consolidated by the 1840s or 1850s, when the
practice of drinking almost any time of day, almost
any time, anywhere, including on the job, comes to
an end. Up to that point, it was quite normal that
if you were working for someone, he would provide
you alcohol, whether it was part of your wages or a
lubricant to keep you going during the day or
providing more incentive. In the homes of course,
it was considered both a tonic and a perfectly
acceptable beverage, as medicine for all sorts of
people. But after the impact of the first
temperance movement, it's pushed out of the
workplace, at least formally. Policy now says you
should not drink on the job. Informally,
anecdotally, we know that right down to the present
people still drink on the job. After the
mid-nineteenth century, however, drinking becomes
primarily a leisure-time activity. Then, most of
the argument is about how people should or should
not spend their time off work and what the
relationship is between the leisure time practices
of men and the home.
The next biggest change
comes in the context of the First World War with
the great national enthusiasm for self-sacrifice.
In most provinces where they're allowed to vote on
the issue, a majority of people vote for
prohibition. And that experience lasts varying
lengths of time, but most provinces opened
government liquor stores by the end of the 1920s.
So it's that short a span of time. Shutting
prohibition down is obviously a big change but from
that point on there was an assumption that you
couldn't allow too much easy access to alcohol.
Post-prohibition policies are called "government
control" for very good reason. The notion is that
you're trying to keep people from drinking too much
by restricting the hours in stores and taverns, by
restricting the activities that can go on there, by
inspecting and shutting places down if they're not
run well-a much tighter policy than went on before
prohibition.
After the Second World War,
a rising level of alcohol consumption followed the
rise of prosperity and more disposable income for
all levels of society. That was then followed after
the 1970s by quite a significant decline in
consumption as economic resources got tighter for a
lot of working class families because of economic
insecurity, periods of unemployment, disappearance
of large parts of the welfare state that used to
provide some backup. Amongst middle-class drinkers,
a kind of new reserve about excessive indulgences
and greater concern about health turned them away
from a lot of unhealthy products. Running through
all of this is the fact that the interest in
drinking, especially for those that wanted to get
drunk on a regular basis, is greater among men. One
of the things that I wanted to make quite clear is
that this is a book to a great extent about men and
masculinity and how women coped with that as much
as anything.
AC:
You usually work on labour history. How has that
perspective influenced your work on
Booze?
CH:
I started this as an exhibition, which was all
about workers and booze. Workers made the stuff;
they sold it; they organised unions in those
sectors. By the end of the nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth century, unions in
those sectors introduced union label, policies to
get other working-class consumers to buy the
products, so there was a kind of outreach into
working-class communities around retailing the
product.
But from the beginning of
the first temperance movements, workers were put at
the centre of the demonology; the archetypal
problem was a working-class household in which the
male breadwinner didn't bring home the bread and
the suffering that went on as a result of that.
When the temperance movement transformed itself
into a prohibition movement, and then at the end of
the nineteenth century made closing the saloon or,
as they called it, banishing the bar the
centrepiece of their campaign, what they were doing
was turning it into a class-based campaign
attacking working-class men in their major
community outlet, other than churches. (You were
more likely to find men in bars than in churches in
those days.) Increasingly workers were pitted
against prohibitionists, although the class lines
were never sharp. There were people from the upper
classes who were definitely opposed to prohibition
as well. But I think that in Canadian history, as
in most Western nations, certainly in American and
British history, there is a very close association
with the public drinking of alcohol (by which
people mean taverns, pubs, saloons, beer parlours,
and beverage rooms) and working men.
Drinking made up an
important part of the time off the job that working
men spent together, some of it purely self
indulgent, time away from responsibility, and some
of it clearly quite utilitarian as it was a place
to learn about jobs, to talk to your workmates
about problems at work, to organise a strike, There
was a variety of ways that within working-class
life these places had a great importance for male
workers. And ultimately, for female workers in
similar ways I think. By the 1960s, the women in
Oshawa who were working at the General Motors plant
met together off the job in a beer parlour, and
that was where they found it was most convenient
and most comfortable to get together. I think that
over the last 30 or 40 years that's become more
common for working-class women to turn to this kind
of public drinking, at least the ones without any
children at home.
So, in a huge number of
ways booze was an important part of working-class
life. Labour movements wanted to try to dodge
around it because they found it too divisive and
too disreputable. They were very reluctant to go to
the wall to defend drinking, although they
certainly did eventually. Booze was a form of
employment, a source of pleasure, a leisure time
activity, a controversial issue within
working-class communities, working-class families;
it ran right through working-class life.
AC:
Booze offers the most thoroughly researched
history of alcohol in Canada and will be of great
interest to Canadian historians. What do you hope
the general reader will get out of the book?
CH:
Well, I hope that the general reader will be able
to appreciate the ways that people thought about
alcohol in their lives and the variety of ways that
they used it. But I also want people to understand
that it was symbolic for most of those people; it
was symbolic of something larger. Just having a
drink with friends might seem like the most casual,
forgettable experience but when you do it regularly
and in certain ways, it has meaning. And when you
stop doing it and bluntly insist that other people
should stop too, it has larger meanings. So I think
that there are important modes of understanding
diversity in our history that need to be discussed.
I think that one of the
questions I'm bound to be asked is, "Are there
lessons or things people can learn from this?" And
the short answer is I'm not sure that this is
directly relevant to any other experience. But it
seems to me there are two interesting parallel
trends going on right now that could relate fairly
closely to alcohol. One is the recent tightening
down on tobacco, which is almost certainly going to
lead in exactly the same direction at the rate it's
going. To try to ban all smoking virtually
everywhere is a ticket to turning it into the kind
of subversive pleasure that alcohol was during the
prohibition era.
More likely, I'm going to
be asked, "Is this relevant to the
decriminalisation and legalisation of marijuana
debate?" And I think it definitely is. All of the
ways in which pot has been marketed and consumed
have a direct parallel with what went on in the
prohibition era: unreliable sources, very high
prices for products, uncertainty about the quality
of the product, the ridiculous levels people went
to avoid breaking the law but broke it nonetheless,
the collusion that went on to prevent the law being
enforced and then the very, very stringent
penalties that were in place if you got caught that
seemed to go far beyond the crime. These are what
legal scholars like to call "victimless crimes";
you are not being charged for having hurt anybody
directly. If you are drunk and you beat up on
somebody then you're charged with assault. You can
also just be charged with being drunk, which is a
completely victimless crime, and you can be charged
with having pot in your possession, which is
another victimless crime.
In general terms, I think
knowing more about Canadian social history enriches
people's lives, not just because they're great
stories, which they certainly are, but we've had a
lot of different ways of dealing with personal
issues, and this is one of the big ones. And to my
astonishment, which takes me back to why I wrote
this book, the history of alcohol in Canada is very
poorly known, very poorly understood. I can't
believe how many people under the age of 35 were
astonished to hear about Ladies and Escorts
sections of beverage rooms and the really tight
policies that existed around the consumption of
alcohol, when I first started drinking, 30 years
ago. It's sort of basic stuff that shouldn't get
lost. There were big mistakes made that shouldn't
be made again, and there are remarkable stories
that need to be told.
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