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improve your reading comprehension skills.

My reading comprehension is miles ahead of your tact. But perhaps you missed my point: alcohol was decriminalized and the free, and legal, market took care of the rest.

I was a bit snippy, I apologize. But you are confusing your terms.

Decriminalization != Legalization

Alchohol prohibition WAS decriminalization in that you could legally possess and consume alchohol, but it was illegal to produce or sell it, thus it maximized the black market all its associated problems.

Alchohol LEGALIZATION (legalizing the supply) is what ended the black market, which supports my orginal point.

"alcohol was decriminalized"

I know this is just a picky point but alcohol was not "decriminalized," it was legalized. I realize some people use those two words interchangeably, but they don't really mean the same thing. Decriminalization can mean a lot of things to different people. You'll even find it as a synonym for legalization in dictionaries written for lay persons. As a legal term of art in drug policy discussions, it is understood by most of the policy wonk types to mean removing criminal but not civil penalties for possession of a small amount of marijuana for "personal use," or at least removing the possibility of jail, although these do not appear to be hard and fast rules. Several states are said to have "decriminalized" marijuana, but it is legal in none of them. In some states said to have decriminalized marijuana you can still actually get a criminal record still for possessing a small amount of marijuana (not sales). In some you can still technically get a little bit of jail time for simple possession. In others you only get a ticket and it's considered a "civil penalty" not leaving you with any criminal record. There is a lot of variation in what decriminalization actually means, but in drug policy discussions most understand it to mean something other than outright legalization with regulation, which is what we have with alcohol.

Sorry for butting in. I just though it might be helpful to clarify the meaning of the term a little so that people are all on the same wavelength in the discussion.