Politics & Power Quote by Drew Carey

Carey’s line works because it smuggles a policy argument into a piece of common-sense Americana: we tried banning a popular vice, it didn’t disappear, and the people who stepped in to meet demand were the ones most comfortable with violence. The intent isn’t to romanticize the Roaring Twenties or excuse modern gangs; it’s to reframe “crime problems” as “market problems” created by law. When you make something widely desired illegal, you don’t end consumption - you outsource distribution to whoever can operate in the shadows.

The subtext is a jab at moralistic politics. Prohibition rhetoric sells purity and protection, but Carey points to the predictable side effect: the state manufactures a premium for risk, and that premium becomes the revenue stream for organized crime. Alcohol bootlegging gave the country Capone; drug prohibition, he implies, has built a similar ecosystem of territorial enforcement, recruitment, and corruption - not because drugs are harmless, but because the rules of an illicit market reward coercion over customer service.

Context matters: as a pop-cultural figure known for affable, everyman bluntness, Carey isn’t presenting a dissertation. He’s deploying a fast historical analogy that feels legible to non-experts. It’s a strategic shortcut: Prohibition is one of the few “we all agree that was a mess” episodes in U.S. memory, so he borrows that consensus to challenge today’s tougher-to-touch assumptions about the drug war. The provocation lands precisely because it suggests the uncomfortable possibility that the “gang problem” is, in part, a policy choice.