Alcohol prohibition required the Constitution twice—once to impose it and once to repeal it. Marijuana prohibition took a different path, imposed through federal law even as a growing number of states have chosen legalization.

In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Steve Herman and Bill Bernardoni examine how national prohibition takes hold, what happens when Americans refuse to comply, and how conflicts between federal and state power can reshape the law.

Historian Richard Hamm explains how nearly a century of temperance organizing, religious activism, women's groups, and state-level campaigns culminated in the Eighteenth Amendment. He describes how the Anti-Saloon League pioneered modern lobbying, how World War I weakened the alcohol industry's political resistance, and why enforcement varied dramatically from one community to another.

Yale Law professor Robert Post explores how Prohibition transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. The enormous enforcement burden helped produce major developments in search-and-seizure law, automobile searches, electronic surveillance, privacy rights, and the Court's control over its own docket. Post also explains how former President William Howard Taft used his executive experience to reshape the role of the chief justice and modernize the federal court system.

Vanderbilt Law professor Robert Mikos brings the debate into the present. He explains why the federal government needed a constitutional amendment to impose alcohol prohibition but has used its Commerce Clause authority to prohibit marijuana. He also examines the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering principle, which allows states to decline to enforce federal marijuana policy even though they cannot repeal federal law.

Together, the conversations reveal a recurring American dilemma: What happens when Washington establishes a national rule, but the states, local authorities, and much of the public no longer accept or enforce it?

Steve Herman is a veteran journalist and former White House bureau chief for Voice of America. During his international reporting career, he covered the White House, national security, diplomacy, politics, and major events across the United States and around the world.

Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing and an experienced radio and podcast producer, political communications professional, and broadcaster. He has produced nationally distributed programming for media organizations, public-policy groups, authors, journalists, and independent hosts.

Richard F. Hamm is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Collins Fellow at the University at Albany, State University of New York. A leading historian of American Prohibition, he is the author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920.

Robert C. Post is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School and served as the school's dean from 2009 to 2017. He is a constitutional-law scholar and the author of The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930.

Robert A. Mikos holds the LaRoche Family Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School and is a leading authority on federalism, marijuana law, and the relationship between state legalization policies and federal drug regulation.

When a federal prohibition remains on the books but states and much of the public have moved in another direction, should Washington continue enforcing the national rule—or formally return the decision to the states?

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