“Did Prohibition Fail”
Andrew Tallman, Townhall.com online, 11/16/2010
“Well, since we all know Prohibition failed …” This assertion is widely taken as the starting premise to
many discussions on such modern social issues as prostitution, drugs, and gambling. In reply, the
advocate of enforcing moral norms through the law must either explain how his plan differs from
Prohibition or else admit defeat. In fact, the reliability of this premise is so widely taken for granted that
even raising the question of whether or not it’s true rings absurd. But if a thing is both widely held and
true, there shouldn’t be any real danger in exploring to verify it, right?
Of course, that fact that an opinion is widely held does not always guarantee truth. Most Americans
believe that the people of Columbus’s time thought the Earth was flat. Sadly, they don’t realize this myth
sprang from anti-Christian propaganda and was cemented in the 19th century by two unreliable histories
and Washington Irving’s fictionalized account of Columbus. Even common sense would tell you that
lesser-educated people in a society (sailers) are unlikely to risk everything on some novel academic
hypothesis. They knew the earth was round (you’d have to be a special fool not to grasp the meaning of a
horizon), they just didn’t know how big it was. Columbus thought he had reached the “West Indies”
because he didn’t know America existed, thinking that the Earth was perhaps only 10,000 miles around.
Another widely held myth is that the colonists came to America because they wanted to establish a land of
religious pluralism. The reality is that most of them came here to flee cultures they viewed as too
corrupted in order to establish more rigorous religious societies than those they left behind in Europe.
This is why so many early states had explicit religious identity. (“Mary”land was Catholic and surly no
one thinks Puritans were renowned for the lax ideas about public morality and religion.) It’s also why it
was so necessary to have a First Amendment and the Constitutional ban on religious test oaths: not to
protect Muslims, but to insure that the Federal Government wouldn’t squelch the States’ devout religious
identities.
So is it possible that the failure of Prohibition could be yet another widely held historical/political myth?
Well, it seems that two questions need to be answered. First, what were the harms of Prohibition? Second,
what, if any, benefits came from it?
The harms are fairly well known. Prohibition led to bootlegging, death or blindness from consuming
adulterated alcohol, loss of tax revenu, loss of business activity, and crime as the mob expanded from
gambling and theft to liquor. It also was the frist period in American history when the law was so widely
broken that disrespect for the authority of the law become it’s own social evil. As I said, all of this is well
known.
But here’s something a little trickier: Can you name any of the benefits of Prohibition?
To hear the tale most people believe, Prohibition was such an unmitigated failure that it’s scarcely
believable it was passed in the first place. “How on earth could the wise people of 1933 have just 14 years
prior been imbeciles of 1919?” But if the 18th Amendment was so foolhardy, why did it come when 19
states had already banned alcohol (starting with Kansas in 1881), when roughly 65 percent of the country
was already dry, and when the margin of “dries” to “wets” in Congress was more than 2 to 1? And if it
was so obviously a mistake, why did it take until 1966 for Mississippi to repeal it and until 1987 for
Kansas to allow “by the drink” alcohol sales?
Again I ask you, can you tell me any of the benefits of Prohibition?
The reason I ask is because it’s generally unwise to be dogmatic about anything without at least some
knowledge of the other side of the discussion. Although believing there just isn’t one feeling like
certainty, it’s really the precarious security of ignorance.
So what was the benefit of Prohibition? Here’s a hint: It’s the one thing people arguing against current
behavioral taboos don’t like to acknowledge. The main benefit of Prohibition was … you guessed it …
people drank a lot less alcohol. But to hear the tale often repeated, Prohibition either had no effect on
consumers or, more amazingly, actually increased it!
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The reality is that average consumption of alcohol in the years prior to most legal restrictions (1906-1910)
was 2.60 gallons per year.
In 1934, when it was again possible to accurately measure, the numbers had dropped below one gallon,
and it didn’t return to the pre-Prohibition level until 1973! During Prohibition, admissions to the
psychiatric facilities for alcohol-related issues dropped 60 percent, arrests for drunkenness decreased 50
percent, cirrhosis deaths for men dropped over 70 percent, and welfare agencies reported tremendous
drops in alcohol-related family problems. Also, although crime is widely cited as a result of Prohibition,
organized crime was actually well-established in cities by 1920. And until the St. Valentines’s Day
Massacre in 1929, most voters believed Prohibition was succeeding, if imperfectly.
Temperance movements have been around since at least the founding of the country with Dr. Benjamin
Rush and other religionists. Consumption was so high in the middle 1800s that Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and Abraham Lincoln all urged abstinence for the good of family and country. Long advocated
by wives, mothers and Christion groups, Prohibition was the “final straw” solution to rampant alcoholism.
And if you asked those victims, they would have told you that their lives were better off because of the
effects Prohibition had on their husbands.
I’m not saying Prohibition was a complete success, or even that on balance it was a success. I’m just
saying that it had the most direct success at its intended goal: reducing alcohol abuse. And in discussions
about other socially harmful behaviors, it’s important to at least be honest about our past efforts to
regulate such things.
One final note is worth mentioning. Alcohol was widely used long before Prohibition, which means the
culture had a longstanding acceptance of it. In a sense , then, it’s amazing this same society banned it at
all. The legal restriction of it brought a significant reduction, which isn’t all that surprising, and those who
wanted it eventually got it back, thankfully at lower levels of abuse.
But it should be obvious that restriction that thing people are already long accustomed to having is much
more difficult than simply keeping a thing restricted they long have viewed as forbidden (like marijuana).
The cultural shift on contraception and abortion (both universally despised just 60 years ago but now
widely accepted) should serve as an illustration of what would happen if currently illicit behaviors were
decriminalized.
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