It’s been tried, without much sucess. The courts, so far, seem to understand the right to counsel. It has caused lawyers to be a bit careful when somone wants to pay their $20,000 in cash. Some prosecutors have gone after lawyers for failing to file that IRS form for large cash transactions. When I did that kind of work, we’d insist the client pay us by check, to avoid the issue.
A related thread in the Pit; the cops claim to smell marijuana in a man’s car, and confiscate his X-Box and 8 games, which have mysteriously disappeared.
Seizure of vehicles and other assets, if implicated in the transportation or smuggling of illegal liquor, was provided for by the Volstead Act that implemented national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. It probably didn’t happen very often to small-time violators and “personal users”, but I’m sure that varied from place to place, and many states had much more draconian anti-liquor laws that approached today’s drug laws in their severity. Michigan had an early version of the three-strikes law, and possession of alcohol was a felony; there were a handful of cases in which a minor defendant got life for a third conviction of possession. Their sentences got commuted after repeal.