"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upshot is that prohibition had a tangible suppressing impact on drinking in this country (for a long time after it was repealed, too), while simultaneously being an unenforceable failure.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.
https://priceonomics.com/did-prohibition-reduce-drinking/ That NBER study linked is questionable; it uses cirrosis as a stand-in for consumption and it uses "the Becker & Murphy model of rationally addictive consumption." That the data assumes everyone drinking a beer is an addict really calls into question any of its math. What struck me overnight is that everyone is quick to draw a line between Prohibition and the opioid epidemic when fuckin'A we've been legalizing marijuana for the past ten years and the results are not controversial.The beginning seemed promising -- in 1921, the annual per capita consumption of alcohol dipped about 75% to 0.2 gallons, down from 0.8 gallons in 1919. However, by 1929, per capita consumption had steadily risen to 1.3 gallons. In other words, within a few years of the 18th Amendment being ratified, alcohol consumption returned to pre-Prohibition levels.
there's something to be said for the 'most important decision you'll make' bit. it's like dropping acid -- most people just have some fun and then go to work on monday, but a subset of users' brains get twisted for a long time. a non-zero chance of extreme negative consequences, like addiction to alcohol, subsequent poverty, and death at 40? should be factored into the equation, yep. but that's the case with a lot of things. know thyself. i will never end up in mr. real-psychiatry's office, and i was drinking with hungarians last week, which is an applied science. but there are a few people in my life who blew the most important decision, all the same.
that's interesting -- multiple studies too. thanks. i've definitely met people who went nuts after they took acid, but... in a good way, sort of? would make sense for this to be much less prevalent than previously stated, if previous studies didn't control for incidence of mental illness in the general population. or something.