"This is the sense in which President Obama's understated pledge not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws potentially achieves for that intoxicant what the Twenty-First Amendment accomplished for beer, wine, and booze during the Great Depression.
Repeal, remember, simply returned to the states the right to decide whether to permit alcoholic beverage sales, and, if so, when and how. If a state permitted sales, it could also enforce minimum- age requirements, limit store hours, set zoning restrictions, and levy taxes. If it prohibited sales, it could bask in righteousness but exercise no control over the traffic that would occur anyway.
Over time nearly every state fell in line behind the tax-and-regulate model."
