The Drug Policy Foundation is doing essentially the same job that Pauline Sabin’s group performed during the closing hours of Prohibition. It was obvious by the late 1920s that the Noble Experiment wasn’t working, but since the prohibitionists controlled the numbers, people had no idea of the depth of the disaster. Sabin’s organization and others like it funded the research that gave the public its first dose of the unadulterated facts.

Sixty years later it’s equally clear the war on drugs has gone belly-up, and the intellectual heirs of Pauline Sabin are making sure this information gets into the hands of the public. For decades Americans have been assured that if they would “stay the course”—tighten the screws, hire more agents, bring in the military, seal the border, crack down on the source countries, arrest Carlos, or Pablo, or De-De—this vast underworld mechanism could be brought to a halt. Success was always just over the next rise. But with the arrival of well-funded reformers on scene, the prohibitionists no longer have control of the dialogue. Now the public at large is starting to ask questions. The op-ed pages and letters-to-the-editor are peppered with demands for another look at the drug war as people across the political spectrum begin to realize that, despite the most monumental prison-building program in history, despite a skyrocketing commitment of money and manpower, despite the arrest of a million people a year for drug offenses, everything is going downhill. The bad guys are getting richer and whole governments are dissolving in the acid-bath of corruption. The U.S. Constitution is now so riddled with drug-emergency exceptions it looks like the flag over Fort Sumpter.

The parting knell for the Eighteenth Amendment was the 1931 report of the Wickersham Commission, a panel of experts assembled by President Hoover to see how Prohibition could be salvaged. Instead they produced an official catalog of failure so damning it set the stage for Repeal. If Wickersham and his