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user-inactivated  ·  2197 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Most Important Decision in Your Life...

"prohibition failed" is one of those interesting semi-myths that i'm inclined to blame on a) textbooks which play up al capone etc and b) second-option bias -- once you hear about the black market stuff it's easy to be the simpleton who says "well you know it spawned a black market." yeah. and we've all heard of the frankly cool nyc chicks from the '20s. they had even cooler equivalents in london who i've been reading about here if anyone cares. the media at the time did a great job convincing americans that everyone but them was getting drunk, which was basically why prohibition finally died. (jealousy always works, which is why it's official irs policy.)

it's similar to the dark age myth. second-option bias kicks in and the moment you hear "well really those magyars and visigoths had crazy amounts of culture, man, plus trade with the islamic world" it sounds like the kind of thing that'll get you the last word at shitty parties... but then bryan ward-perkins does a study of the amount of pottery in the ground, and one of my old professors is writing books about bioarchaeology w/r/t roman plagues of all things, and yeah, it pretty much happened. sorry.

it also depends who you ask. libertarians hate prohibition because they see it as an overreach, which realistically it was, and so they trot out the opiate stuff and attack it from that angle. mother jones probably hates it because they hate the war on drugs and that particular hypocrisy would be too unsubtle even for them.

anyway, the upshot is that prohibition had a tangible suppressing impact on drinking in this country (for a long time after it was repealed, too), while simultaneously being an unenforceable failure. this was obscured by the great depression, the fact that drinking was way down in the states in the years before the 18th amendment, the usual suspects in the media, etc. i'm really interested in that graph of alcoholism deaths, though.