It was against personal liberty.
Yes, criminal ganga existed before prohibition but prohibition gave them an extreme chance to proliferate into the everyday life of citizens.
If prohibition succeeded so well why was it repealed?
Even if these numbers are true (highly doubtful), do they justify government intervention in people's personal decisions? Prohibition was a disaster that lives with us to this day in the spider-web of laws that attempt to regulate what?
I have heard of these stats before and agree that Prohibition wasn’t the disaster it was portrayed to be. Today, however, the state’s apparatus has grown immensely from efforts to fight drugs and I’d rather see violent criminals only being put in prison. If and when this includes drug traffickers, so be it, but putting minor users in jail is a waste.
My Lord G-d blessed/cursed me with free will at the moment of my birth. Who is The Government to take it away?
The problem with Prohibition was that the law was a) rather vague, b) gave the Federal Government the power to [arbitrarily] define “intoxicating liquors” [something most would think would be hard alcohol; yet the definition supplied by the federal government disallowed even beer], and c) was by its nature unenforceable.
C is perhaps the most disturbing in-nature, it is the method by which the government is stripping away our rights: turning Justice from something that is blind and treats everyone equal into something wicked and evil that is wholly dependent on the whims of the police/judge/prosecutor.
Interesting and probably containing some truth. I know my Grandfather on my Dad’s side made a little beer for personal consumption.
Actually you lie about being against prohibition. You are for it as your article clearly shows. Prohibition was a total failure and led to huge criminality across America,just as the drug laws in effect do today. And, just like the drug laws today prohibition and the frenzy of law enforcement agencies to control it led to huge losses of freedom for the citizens of the USA.
One bad law breeds disrespect for all. Prohibition turned a relatively law abiding nation into an utterly lawless one. Other more standards plummeted terribly during that time. We have still not recovered.
Drug Prohibition is doing the same, and worse, we have a far more corrupt government now, which uses it as an excuse for deprivation of civil rights. I am more afraid of the government than I am of drug users.
The Prohibition Party still soldiers on, obscurely and irrelevantly. Their 2008 presidential candidate got a grand total of 643 votes. Yet, they did manage to elect one public official in the 21st century, a Pennsylvania township tax assesor. Not exactly relevant....
http://www.prohibition.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_Party
Christ’s first miracle was to make wine.
Lots of it.
A ten-second google search produced this well-researched and attributed article which destroys the author's fantasies and fallacies. The graph images wouldn't load for me, but the text makes it clear: cirrhosis rates were at their lowest right before prohibition, and murder rates jumped considerably during prohibition - and murder rates jumped again when the current WoD was escalated.
Does trading victims of cirrhosis for victims of murder make sense in any logical or ethical system? Perhaps some people are confused by the use of the term 'victim' in both cases. To be clear: people that died from cirrhosis slowly killed themselves, most often with ample warnings and opportunities to stop. If I have to explain the difference between this and murder, you should stop reading now and instead immediately seek professional counseling.
There is scant official data on how many people were killed or blinded by unregulated alcohol products, but there's no doubt that it happened far more frequently during prohibition.
In addition, alcohol consumption patterns were changed dramatically by prohibition - hard liquor gained precedence over beer and wine, due to the risk/reward of transporting illegal goods. This pattern is repeated by today's WoD.
There is nothing new or novel or noble or "successful" about a prohibition. A prohibition says, in effect, "You will adhere to this moral standard or we will kill you." Prohibiting an otherwise lawful transaction between consenting adults is simply wrong, regardless of whether you personally like or dislike the transaction. The supurious argument 'well why not remove the prohibition on murder' is fallacious: murder is not consensual. In a prohibition, there is no victim to protect. No one's rights are violated. "Society" is not a victim, "society" is not a partner in the transaction, "society" is nor harmed by the transaction, "society" - an imaginary collective - has no rights. The attempt to justify prohibitions by using "society" in this manner are illogical, and every bit as reprehensible a tactic as politicians hiding their personal ambitions and pet schemes behind the smokescreen of "the chilrun".
Arguments about the costs of alcohol, drug, and/or tobacco users on government-supplied systems such as Medicare or Welfare et al are equally irrelevant. You cannot justify keeping one bad policy or program because of its impact on another bad policy or program. If anything, these are just more reasons to discontinue these policies/programs.
Prohibitions cause crimes beyond the simple violation of the prohibition itself, by unbalancing the supply, demand, and price. Worse, prohibitions get people killed. It's a race to see if tainted products claim more victims in the long run than associated violence - but regardless of the final numbers, there is no winner.
The drys didn't lose because they were drys. They lost because they were the ones running when everything came down.
I think 0 is going to do to his party what Hoover did to the Pubs, btw.
Anyway there is a lesson for libertarians regarding Prohibition: booze makers and distributors following their "rational self-interest" created such a mess that the ground was seeded for regulatory extremism to where a constitutional amendment actually passed.
Something very similar is happening with cigarettes. Tobacco companies following their "rational self-interest" managed to get 2/3s of Americans smoking at least a pack a day by the mid-60s.
A backlash occurred and now there are bans on smoking in restaurants and cars.
I would think whether prohibition failed or succeeded depends on it’s original intent. As soon as it was repealed, alcohol sales did what? Go down, stay level, skyrocket? If it did anything, it proved that people with a taste for alcohol were forced to drink discretely as they tended to dislike being arrested. Once the threat of arrest was lifted, discreteness was immediately dropped.
Look at smoking. We couldn’t buy smokes as a teenager, but many high-schoolers smoked. Discretely when there was a risk of being punished and openly otherwise. Jump to today and teen smoking is down — not because there are laws & regs against it, but because it has fallen out of fashion. No one “cool” smokes anymore. Well, at least in our area.
When it comes to tobacco, alcohol or drugs, laws may artificially reduce consumption, but it has a greater tendency to force discreteness and promote a thriving black-market. I’m not saying legislating morality is good or bad, but the “good” of the legislation is often overshadowed by the “bad” of the unintended consequences. How to better address the desired outcome is beyond me. But personal observation shows that what’s been tried so far includes some *seriously* bad unintended consequences.