AHC WI War on Alcohol 1920s

How could the amount of effort that was put into the prohbition of others subjects since the 80s had been put into alcohol prohibition?

If so how big of a difference would it have made.
 
Industrial Ethanol was actually, by law, laced with poison to prevent people from drinking it. They did anyway. It was a rough time.
 
The premise is the same vigourm, and maybe media hysteria, over alcohol during early prohibition as happened with other substances during the 1980s
 
Hmmm...

It seems like your OP was properly understood by respondents. The consensus, which I agree with, is that there wasn't a significant difference. If you think there was, please explain.
 
It would take a seismic shift in no fewer than 49 legislative bodies to have that happen: enforcement was allocated to both the federal government and all 48 states. Good luck getting that kind of consensus then when there was a huge spectrum of state-level involvement--including Maryland where it was exactly zero for the duration. That's right: Maryland never appropriated so much as a cent for prohibition enforcement.
 
The "War on Drugs" is the same idiotic premise as Prohibition, with more dangerous rhetoric, more onerous laws, & more poisonous & destructive results. And more damn willful blindness to failure & societal harm than I ever imagined possible.:mad:
 
It occurs to me that if the rhetoric surrounding illegal drugs in the War On Drugs is more overblown than the anti-alcohol rhetoric from Prohibition was, it's most likely because fewer people actually take illegal drugs -- but Americans used to drink LOTS of alcohol.
 

nooblet

Banned
How could the amount of effort that was put into the prohbition of others subjects since the 80s had been put into alcohol prohibition?

If so how big of a difference would it have made.

The war on drugs, like prohibition, was never about stopping the trade of illegal drugs. It was a scheme to justify a rise in police expenditure, target groups of poor people, and placate groups who, for various reasons, genuinely wanted to curb the drug trade or alcohol trade for moral reasons. Those groups felt (correctly) that an outright ban was the only way to do that.

Unlike the war on drugs, alcohol is far too commonplace, and a lot easier to produce than most hard drugs. It's a much harder sell to tell people to stop drinking a drug they've known for millenia, then to tell people to not do a drug that comes from some strange foriegn land. So I doubt that prohibition would have been affected much if it adopted similar tactics to the longer war on drugs. Had prohibition adopted a much harsher line, it could have worked, but it would have taken a few generations to socially engineer society to remove alcohol from the collective consciousness - probably twice that length considering the world events taking place at that time. The war on drugs, if it were fought even halfway competently, could be curbed to nearly nothing within 20 years, and that's without resorting to extreme levels of violence. Only marijuana is widespread enough and common enough to cultivate that suppression would be particularly difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as alcohol.
Whether any of those would be a good idea is another question altogether. The real problem isn't the drugs, it's the people in charge of drug culture and glorification, and if drugs were somehow suppressed, the same people would find another avenue to exercise power.
 
The war on drugs, like prohibition, was never about stopping the trade of illegal drugs. It was a scheme to justify a rise in police expenditure, target groups of poor people, and placate groups who, for various reasons, genuinely wanted to curb the drug trade or alcohol trade for moral reasons. Those groups felt (correctly) that an outright ban was the only way to do that.

Unlike the war on drugs, alcohol is far too commonplace, and a lot easier to produce than most hard drugs. It's a much harder sell to tell people to stop drinking a drug they've known for millenia, then to tell people to not do a drug that comes from some strange foriegn land. So I doubt that prohibition would have been affected much if it adopted similar tactics to the longer war on drugs. Had prohibition adopted a much harsher line, it could have worked, but it would have taken a few generations to socially engineer society to remove alcohol from the collective consciousness - probably twice that length considering the world events taking place at that time. The war on drugs, if it were fought even halfway competently, could be curbed to nearly nothing within 20 years, and that's without resorting to extreme levels of violence. Only marijuana is widespread enough and common enough to cultivate that suppression would be particularly difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as alcohol.
Whether any of those would be a good idea is another question altogether. The real problem isn't the drugs, it's the people in charge of drug culture and glorification, and if drugs were somehow suppressed, the same people would find another avenue to exercise power.

Exactly. Even today, drunk driving laws are way less strict than drug laws, because they don't disproportionately affect minorities.
 
Plumber said:
because they don't disproportionately affect minorities.
More accurately, because they do affect the power structure & the likelihood of members of it being caught.:rolleyes:
 
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