No, it's not Prohibition

[madrobins]

California has, among other things, a law which requires high schools to phase out the selling of soda on school property by 2007. And predictably, someone (a high school student) is trying to get an initiative on the ballot to repeal the law, because "it's like the Prohibition movement, and we all saw what happened with that." Except that, of course, during Prohibition the only way to get alcohol was to buy it illegally; with the ban on selling soda in the schools, you have to wait until 3:30 to buy a Sprite, and there are no legal consequences (Hell, if you bring a can of soda with your home-packed lunch, no one's going to wrestle you down to the ground to take it away from you). The student, Rocky Slaughter, wants to have vending machines filled half-and-half, soda and drinks labeled "healthy choices." And it's possible that the majority of students will go for water or juice or sports drinks (me, I think chugging 16 oz. of juice or Gatorade is just as fattening as 16 oz. of Coke, although juice or sports drinks may have some nutritional benefit that Coke doesn't) over soda. Or maybe not. Slaughter argues that teenagers should be permitted to make the choice themselves, given adequate information about the nutritional costs and benefits. But I don't think that's the point of the law. The point of the law is that the SFUSD should not be in the business of providing food it knows to be unhealthy to high school students; kids have adequate opportunity to tank up on Pepsi elsewhere, after school. This is no more constitutes Prohibition than a magazine's unwillingness to buy a story of mine constitutes censorship.