WI: Alcohol Prohibition had no unintended consequences

What if prohibition didn't cause crime rates to go up? What if the amount of Americans who drank was successfully reduced to a negiglible amount?
 
How does this happen? What exactly causes the Prohibition succeed when it did not IOTL? Especially as the growth of illegal smuggling and consumption attended all the other attempts at prohibition in the same timeframe as well.
 
What if prohibition didn't cause crime rates to go up?

The murder rate was already on the rise before prohibition, and was already fallen before it was repealed. In 1920 when it was enacted the murder rate was about 8.0, and by the end in 1933, it was about 8.0. It spiked to a rate of 10.0 in the middle, or increased by 2 points, but had already fallen before prohibition was repealed.

What if the amount of Americans who drank was successfully reduced to a negiglible amount?

Alcohol use went down by 30-50% during prohibition, or about half, and the number of cases of liver cirrhosis went down from 30.0 per 100,000 people to 10.0 per 100,000 people, or being dropped by three times the amount, while admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928.
 
The notion "Prohibition must have caused a drastic decline in alcohol consumption because deaths from cirrhosis of the liver declined so much" is subjected to serious criticism here:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9681.pdf

"The U.S. experience with national prohibition of alcohol plays a frequent role in discussions of government policy toward alcohol, drugs and other commodities. Central to this debate is whether, or to what degree, Prohibition reduced consumption of alcohol. Data on alcohol consumption are not available for the Prohibition period, however, so numerous authors have used the cirrhosis death rate to infer the behavior of alcohol consumption. Focusing on comparisons of the pre-Prohibition and early Prohibition periods, these authors have suggested that Prohibition caused as much as a 50% decline in cirrhosis.1

"Existing analyses of Prohibition and cirrhosis are potentially problematic, however. Most analyses have focused on the univariate behavior of cirrhosis and conducted simple comparisons of the pre-Prohibition and Prohibition periods. This approach ignores other Prohibition-era changes in alcohol-control policies, including state prohibitions, wartime prohibition, and increased alcohol taxation. Likewise, the univariate approach fails to account for the many nonpolicy variables that might affect cirrhosis, including social attitudes, income, war, and demographics.

"This paper evaluates the impact of Prohibition on cirrhosis death rates, and it considers the possible implications for understanding the effects of prohibitions generally.

"Section 2 re-examines the relation between cirrhosis and alcohol consumption. Both biomedical research and comparisons across countries or time periods suggest alcohol consumption is an important determinant of cirrhosis. Using cirrhosis to infer Prohibition’s impact on alcohol consumption, however, assumes that short-term fluctuations in cirrhosis are reasonable proxies for short-term fluctuations in alcohol consumption. We document that the time-series variation in alcohol consumption explains much of the time-series variation in cirrhosis, but the relation is far from perfect. More importantly, various aspects of the relation need to be accounted for if the behavior of cirrhosis is to suggest conclusions about alcohol consumption.

"Section 3 begins our examination of Prohibition’s impact on cirrhosis. We show that cirrhosis was lower during Prohibition than in most years before or after, which makes a prima facie case that Prohibition reduced cirrhosis. Further examination, however, suggests caution in drawing this conclusion. First, there have been substantial fluctuations in cirrhosis outside the Prohibition period, which suggests that factors other than Prohibition should be considered before concluding that Prohibition caused the low level during Prohibition. Second, cirrhosis did not jump dramatically upon repeal of Prohibition, which fails to suggest an important effect of Prohibition. Most importantly, cirrhosis had fallen to its low, Prohibition level by the time Prohibition began, which means Prohibition did not cause the low level of cirrhosis at the beginning of Prohibition.

"Section 4 then presents regressions of state-level cirrhosis death rates on measures of state prohibition, constitutional prohibition, and other variables. These regressions suggest that state-level prohibition had only a small impact on cirrhosis; instead, one or more aggregate factors caused a major decline in cirrhosis during the 1917-1919 period. Pre-1920 federal antialcohol policies might have contributed to this decline, but other factors were likely important influences as well. Whatever caused the pre-1920 decline, constitutional Prohibition lowered the cirrhosis death rate by about 10-20%....

"We conclude by relating our results to the literature on the price-elasticity of the demand for alcohol. That literature offers a broad range of elasticity estimates, from virtually zero for certain population subgroups to well in excess of -1.0 overall.32 If the true elasticity is in the middle of this range, the small response of cirrhosis to Prohibition is surprising given the conventional view that alcohol prices rose substantially during Prohibition. The estimates in Table 4 above indicate an elasticity of cirrhosis with respect to alcohol consumption of 0.4-0.7, and Thornton (1991) suggests that alcohol prices rose by about 500%. This implies that cirrhosis should have fallen to almost nothing, rather than declining 10-20% as estimated above.

"One possible reconciliation is that the relevant elasticity is in fact quite low. The proxy for alcohol consumption considered here is plausibly a better measure of heavy consumption than of moderate consumption. Theory does not suggest that heavy or addictive consumption is necessarily inelastic (Becker and Murphy 1988), but there is evidence from micro data suggesting that heavy consumption of alcohol is in fact virtually price inelastic (Manning, Blumberg, and Moulton 1995).

"A second possible reconciliation is that the standard view about alcohol prices is inaccurate. The conventional wisdom is based on data in Warburton (1932) and Fisher (1928, 1930); reexamination of these data suggests a more nuanced picture.

"The first problem with the standard view is that it neglects the behavior of the overall price level. Warburton's data compare prices between 1911-1915 and 1926-1930, while Fisher's compare prices between 1916 and 1928. Both authors examine the behavior of nominal prices, yet the price level increased by approximately 75 per cent between these two periods (Bureau of the Census (1975), p. 211). Thus, the raw data presented by Warburton and Fisher overstate the increase in the relative price of alcohol.

"In addition, Warburton presents a broad range of prices for the Prohibition period, and the lowest prices reported suggest that, even ignoring inflation, some alcoholic beverage prices fell relative to the pre-Prohibition period. This does not prove consumers paid less on average for alcohol, but they faced an incentive to buy at the lowest prices and then stockpile the quantities purchased. The available data do not allow computation of the average price actually paid, and the extremely high prices reported in many cases by both Warburton and Fisher allow for the possibility that the average price in fact rose. But the magnitude of this rise is undoubtedly less than they asserted, and it is possible prices failed to rise substantially overall. If prices did not increase very much, there is no puzzle in the failure of consumption to fall substantially.

"This last “explanation” raises the question of why prices would not have risen more strongly. One possibility is that because black market suppliers faced low marginal costs of evading alcohol taxes and cost-increasing regulation, the net effect of prohibition on costs was modest (Miron 2003).

"A second hypothesis is that Prohibition had little chance of being effective because of the numerous avenues for evasion (Merz 1930, pp.65-71). Under Prohibition, physicians, druggists and manufacturers of proprietary medicines could receive licenses to prescribe and dispense liquor for “medicinal” purposes. The production of beer for the purpose of making near beer remained legal, as did the production of industrial alcohol.33 Both exceptions to Prohibition allowed for substantial diversion to consumption. Smuggling across the vast borders of the U.S. provided another way to circumvent Prohibition. And perhaps most importantly, home production and small scale production of alcohol proliferated, thereby straining even the most vigorous enforcement efforts.

"A third possibility is that Prohibition created a forbidden fruit effect, thereby shifting preferences for alcohol and partially offsetting the depressing effect on demand of higher prices. This hypothesis receives anecdotal support in some contexts, and accounts of drinking behavior during Prohibition are consistent with such an effect (e.g., the term “roaring 20s”). Without more detailed evidence, however, one cannot interpret the results here as a strong indication of such an effect..."
 
The problem with Prohibition is that it was passed without an overwhelming moral consensus. If say 90% of the population supported it, it'd have less unintended consequences. As it stood, I bet at least half the population either didn't support it or actually violated the law themselves.
 
The problem with Prohibition is that it was passed without an overwhelming moral consensus. If say 90% of the population supported it, it'd have less unintended consequences. As it stood, I bet at least half the population either didn't support it or actually violated the law themselves.

My paternal grandmother supported her family well during prohibition by making vino and grappa in her basement, and continued to supplement her income afterwards 'til her death in 1950. Her red wine was so good that until I came across German reds many, many years later, I drank NO red wine at all...
 
My paternal grandmother supported her family well during prohibition by making vino and grappa in her basement, and continued to supplement her income afterwards 'til her death in 1950. Her red wine was so good that until I came across German reds many, many years later, I drank NO red wine at all...

And my maternal grandfather's family made wine throughout Prohibition, as did my great grandfather. And these were 'upstanding middle class' people.
 

Send that shit to ASB then because that’s not at all how mainstream AH works.

“How did North Korea successfully invade Sweden?

Magic.”

Now if Prohibition were backed by a lot more of a cultural shift the way smoking bans these days were, it could work, but even then, you would still have people in trouble for moonshine or bootlegged beer the same way people get in trouble for rolled cigs these days.
 
The problem with this is that unlike heroin or cocaine, alcohol is so ingrained in everyday Western life that prohibition is impossible to enforce without creating the OTL side effects of organized crime, bootlegging, increased drunkenness, political corruption, etc. And even without those side effects, prohibition will still likely have failed because the government needed both an unconstitutional authority over people's private lives and a staggering amount of money to be successfully enforced.
 
The problem with this is that unlike heroin or cocaine, alcohol is so ingrained in everyday Western life that prohibition is impossible to enforce without creating the OTL side effects of organized crime, bootlegging, increased drunkenness, political corruption, etc. And even without those side effects, prohibition will still likely have failed because the government needed both an unconstitutional authority over people's private lives and a staggering amount of money to be successfully enforced.


And yet the government leaned nothing and we have had the war on a harmless smokeable flower ever since.

And yup it's taking the exact same pattern alcohol did.
 
And even without those side effects, prohibition will still likely have failed because the government needed both an unconstitutional authority over people's private lives and a staggering amount of money to be successfully enforced.

I will say this for the prohibitionists: they at least recognized the need for a constitutional amendment to authorize Congress to ban the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol.

Contrast that with the War on Drugs we've had since the 70s and concurrent increase in law enforcement powers.
 
You have two options, fail the Amendment itself and "Prohibition" remains a State and Local domain, allowing any impacts to be moderated as some States and/or Counties remain "wet." Two, fail the enabling legislation, making it enforced differently, the most obvious being beer and wine not considered "intoxicating liquors" such that Prohibition is contained to spirits. Or have it enforced in some different manner, perhaps only fines and no jail. These give you prohibition without as far reaching or obvious national impact. Whether you can thus butterfly all negative social effects will remain to be seen.
 
One of the reasons given for prohibition happening was we still had a significant military presence overseas. Now whether that is actual reality or just what they're talking about I don't know. Pot is a prime example of why probation went wrong you can't stop people from doing something they want to they will pay for it anyway they can and all the government does is spend more money trying to stop it take away more liberties and lose the tax dollars. My grandparents both came of age in the 20s have you look at the social aspect of our country from 1900 through 1930 Americans were pretty tight ass people the fact that alcohol was illegal made it that more tempting. Unless you were deaf dumb and blind and had your nose cut off you could find alcohol about as easy as you can find pot. Historically if you look at our history with things like the Whiskey Rebellion you would know you're not going to stop Americans from drinking. In that case it was regarding taxes on alcohol very early in the country shows how ingrained no pun intended alcohol use is. Prohibition only helped ships flying a flag other than American, because they could go out past the Twelve Mile limit unlock the liquor cabinets and away we go. It hurt the liquor stores the liquor companies and it made people are less likely to trust in like the law. With the amount of gang violence obviously there was a profit in it. I don't marijuana because that's the first hit I get I'm drunk in the room is spinning not real fun however I could walk out in a couple hours at the most by all of it I could use. So in effect I see no good things coming from prohibition. When you add the good to the bad the bad wins by far.
 
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, but what if Prohibition had been limited to hard alcohol as many had initially expected it would?

Beer and wine being allowed while harder stuff was illegal may even prevent the repeal of Prohibition, with there not being the political will to go through repealing an entire amendment if hard liquor is supplanted by beers and wines in popular culture.

The US today would be seen as rather odd but a lot of other Western countries for their lack of hard alcohol or anything that'd really knock you on your ass if you took shots of it, but there would almost certainly be a wide variety of beers and wines that may even lean on the harder side without crossing into illegality.

That of course might not be what the OP intended, but it would have a significantly better chance to work.
 
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