Jay L. Zagorsky does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On Jan. Prohibition , embodied in the U. Yet it remained legal to drink , and alcohol was widely available throughout Prohibition, which ended in I am reminded of how easy it was to drink during Prohibition every time I go to the hotel in New Hampshire that hosted the Bretton Woods Conference , which created the modern international monetary system after World War II.
The hotel, now known as the Omni Mount Washington Resort, boasts a basement speakeasy called The Cave that served illegal liquor during Prohibition. The last time I was in The Cave I began wondering, given how prevalent Prohibition-era speakeasies appear to have been, what effect banning alcohol had on consumption rates.
The Prohibition movement began in the early s based on noble ideas such as boosting savings, reducing domestic violence and improving family life. At the time, alcohol usage was soaring in the U. Some estimates by alcohol opponents put consumption at three times what it is today.
Activists thought that prohibiting its sale would curb excess drinking. Their efforts were very effective. But while Prohibition is often portrayed as a sharp change that happened with one last national call for drinks just before the stroke of midnight, thousands of towns throughout the country had gone dry well before that. People could still drink — if they could get hold of the stuff.
Presidents drank, senators drank, congressmen drank, police chiefs drank. Turning a blind eye to criminals such as Al Capone allowed fortunes to be built on bootlegging.
If you wanted a drink, you could get one — indeed the joke was that it was easier to get booze under prohibition than previously, when a patchwork of regulations had limited where and when you could buy alcohol. Some experts have argued that the federal apparatus of enforcement was never sufficient to police such a far-reaching piece of legislation over a country as vast as the US.
But historian Lisa McGirr, in her recently published book The War on Alcohol , says it was not the efficiency of enforcement that was at fault. But, she argues, enforcement had an in-built class bias: the war was waged primarily against the poor, the working class, immigrant communities, the marginalised. That assault was most systematic in the mid-west and the south, where the Ku Klux Klan were active in pursuing bootleggers and backsliders.
Just as the Volstead Act represented a rearguard action by old, militant Protestant, white America, so its enforcement was conditioned by the values and social biases of the groups that had backed it.
Complete prohibition was always going to be desperately difficult to enforce, but this patchy, politically motivated, socially divisive application of the act made it increasingly unpopular. An unenforceable or corruptly enforced law is a bad law, and the Volstead Act was eventually discredited.
It decimated the legitimate beer, spirits and fledgling wine industry in the US, but Americans who wanted to drink carried on drinking as alcohol flowed in from neighbouring countries.
Estimated consumption in the s dropped to half its previous level — a long way short of the teetotalism that temperance campaigners, who believed that alcohol consumption would somehow become a historical anomaly, believed was possible. As well as boosting organised crime and political corruption, prohibition made life worse for many hardened drinkers.
The trend away from spirits towards beer was reversed during prohibition, because bootleggers made greater profits by smuggling spirits. And there was less remedial help available for alcoholics because heavy drinking was seen as a moral failing rather than a disease. Alcoholics Anonymous was not formed until , two years after repeal, by which time it was possible to separate social drinking from habitual drinking, drinking for leisure from drinking for life.
One likely reason is that the United States experienced a severe recession in and When the economy recovered in to start the roaring 20s, people were more able to afford illegal liquor. In the decades after Prohibition ended on December 5, , with the repeal of the 18th Amendment, consumption remained relatively subdued. Today Americans drink on average about 2. Drinking also moved from public spaces like saloons into the home.
More negatively, some claim it created organized crime as violence soared and mobsters enriched themselves. It also meant states and the federal government, which relied heavily on excise taxes from liquor sales to fund their budgets, turned to income taxes to help make up for the gap.
And ultimately it did not result in a significant or lasting drop in alcohol consumption. For these reasons, many people believe it was a failure , which should give pause to policymakers and others pushing for a ban on smoking or vaping.
And even the person most responsible for drafting Prohibition legislation, US Rep. Andrew Volstead R-Minn. So, as an economist, I believe if you want to stop people from doing something injurious to their health, raising the price works better than a ban.
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Should be a reminder that a healthy relationship to alcohol is important including lowering the drinking age to a standard Your email address will not be published.
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