It is a curious fact that New Jersey’s referendum on marijuana legalization will occur in the same year as the 100th anniversary of the beginning of alcohol Prohibition.

The centennial of the effective date of the Volstead Act outlawing alcoholic beverages will occur on January 17. But I doubt anyone will be celebrating it.

Why neglect such an important historic event? Here’s what the great critic of Prohibition H.L. Mencken said:

“Americans always tend to forget things so disagreeable. They have put the memory of Prohibition out of their minds just as they have put the memory of the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19.”

He wrote that a mere nine years after the end of Prohibition in 1933. The so-called “Noble Experiment” failed for the same reason the War on Drugs has failed. The politicians and bureaucrats behind such projects always take things too far.

In the case of Prohibition, the infamous 18th amendment, which was ratified in 1919, banned only “intoxicating liquors.” If the do-gooders had stuck to banning just booze, then they might have achieved some of their goals.

But the enabling legislation, the Volstead Act, banned beer and wine as well. That shocked the drinking public into action, said Mencken.

“The instant they realized what was upon them they put the national ingenuity and the national talent for corruption to the job and it was finished in six months,” he wrote.

New Jersey was a national leader in this regard. The Atlantic County Republican machine managed to combine both corruption and ingenuity in protecting Atlantic City drinking establishments from the federal agents assigned to enforce Prohibition. The city’s economy boomed even more with illegal booze than it later did with legal gambling.

The same holds true for the not-so-noble experiment with drug prohibition that took off during the 1960s. If the do-gooders had stuck to hard drugs, they would have had wide public support. But by treating marijuana like heroin and cocaine, they made outlaws out of great numbers of middle-class Americans.

As Mencken noted, people have ways of getting around laws they don’t like. I learned about some of the more inventive responses to Prohibition from Dave Hoffman, who runs one of the older microbreweries in the state, the Climax Brewery in Roselle Park.

Hoffman is a historian of beer as well as a brewer. He recalls one exploratory visit to Philadelphia, which was a hotbed of illegal brewing during the terrible 13 years of Prohibition.

A friend took him to an old brewery that still stands 70 years after it shut down.

“He said, ‘Come one, I’m gonna show you something really cool,’” Hoffman recalled. “He took me down in the basement and there was a tunnel under the street. They had lines running to a speakeasy.”

A more unsettling incident occurred at the Rising Sun brewery, which was in the port section of Elizabeth. In 1930, federal agents raided Rising Sun. As the agents were arresting some of the workers, they were surprised by the pistol-packing members of the Mickey Duffy mob, who disarmed them.

At that point a federal agent famed for his enforcement efforts, John Finiello, entered the brewery. The New York Times reported on it in language right out of a gangster movie:

“’There’s Finiello. Give it to him!’ shouted one of the gangsters. A volley of gunfire sounded and the room was filled with pistol smoke. Running around the body, the gangsters fled from the room.”

Another contemporary account said that after police responded to the shooting scene, “Angry citizens of Elizabeth, located in one of the last holdout states to ratify the Prohibition amendment, threw rocks at the lawmen and tried to storm the brewery, which provided a case of suds a month to every local drinker.”

Prohibition was in its final years when that occurred. And when the repeal amendment was finally put to the states in 1933, New Jersey was among the first to support it.

It would be nice to think the politicians acted out of principle, because they realized it was insane for people to be fighting gun battles over something as simple as beer.

But Hoffman said he thinks a more important reason was that government on both the state and federal levels had lost huge amounts of revenue thanks to Prohibition.

“Everybody was screwing them out of their tax money during Prohibition,” said Hoffman. “The loss of tax revenues was staggering.”

The same is true to this day concerning the tax revenue from legalized marijuana.

But I suspect by this time next year the politicians – and the potheads - will be partying like it’s 1933.