Did alcohol prohibition in the US actually fail? We have much lower levels of alcohol use, and thus presumably of alcohol abuse, in the US than in Europe. Perhaps this is the legacy of Prohibition.
If memory serves me, the US actually has a higher rate of alcohol abuse vs. use relative to most other countries. Or possibly it was a higher rate of death/injury/illness due to alcohol.
At any rate, Europeans seem to drink more than Americans do (on average), but do not suffer appreciably higher rates of alcohol-related problems.
Did it succeed? Presumably the explicit intent of prohibition was to eliminate alcohol consumption in the population and the implicit intent was to do so without paying an unreasonably high cost due to intended or unintended consequences. The law clearly failed to eliminate alcohol consumption—it continued to be made, sold and consumed in illegal underground establishments. It also produced unreasonably high social costs (higher than those caused by alcohol when legal) through increased deaths and blindness due to high levels of methanol and through a huge increase in violent organized crime. It’s hard to see any evidence of success there.
You seem to be suggesting that perhaps the intent of the ban was also to send an official message of disapproval, and thus influence society to disapprove of alcohol more and so reduce consumption through self limiting behaviours. You also suggest without any evidence that this may have lead to lower levels of alcohol use (only a benefit if you hold the opinion that alcohol consumption is inherently a negative even in the absence of negative side effects) and make a further unsupported leap to suppose that lower levels of use correlate with lower levels of abuse. Even if it is the case that the US has lower levels of alcohol use and abuse than Europe, how do you propose to establish direction of causality from a country with a sufficient tradition of religious disapproval of alcohol to allow a ban on alcohol to pass? Is it not equally plausible that the same social attitudes that made a ban feasible in the first place also explain lower levels of use before and after the ban?
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
Did alcohol prohibition in the US actually fail? We have much lower levels of alcohol use, and thus presumably of alcohol abuse, in the US than in Europe. Perhaps this is the legacy of Prohibition.
If memory serves me, the US actually has a higher rate of alcohol abuse vs. use relative to most other countries. Or possibly it was a higher rate of death/injury/illness due to alcohol.
At any rate, Europeans seem to drink more than Americans do (on average), but do not suffer appreciably higher rates of alcohol-related problems.
Did it succeed? Presumably the explicit intent of prohibition was to eliminate alcohol consumption in the population and the implicit intent was to do so without paying an unreasonably high cost due to intended or unintended consequences. The law clearly failed to eliminate alcohol consumption—it continued to be made, sold and consumed in illegal underground establishments. It also produced unreasonably high social costs (higher than those caused by alcohol when legal) through increased deaths and blindness due to high levels of methanol and through a huge increase in violent organized crime. It’s hard to see any evidence of success there.
You seem to be suggesting that perhaps the intent of the ban was also to send an official message of disapproval, and thus influence society to disapprove of alcohol more and so reduce consumption through self limiting behaviours. You also suggest without any evidence that this may have lead to lower levels of alcohol use (only a benefit if you hold the opinion that alcohol consumption is inherently a negative even in the absence of negative side effects) and make a further unsupported leap to suppose that lower levels of use correlate with lower levels of abuse. Even if it is the case that the US has lower levels of alcohol use and abuse than Europe, how do you propose to establish direction of causality from a country with a sufficient tradition of religious disapproval of alcohol to allow a ban on alcohol to pass? Is it not equally plausible that the same social attitudes that made a ban feasible in the first place also explain lower levels of use before and after the ban?
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
current national alcohol consumption per capita alcoholic liver disease per capital
Prohibition worked.