i don't understand what societal problem you do you mean here - the prohibition or the alcohol. If you mean that the societal problem was the prohibition then we do know that it was solved by the bootlegging at a massive scale which relied on using cars and machine guns with modern communication of the time - telephone - playing a significant role too. If you mean that the problem was alcohol - i don't see where and when it was solved at all.
It is kind of complicated. Alcohol was also causing massive social issues (hence calls for prohibition). More social issues then drugs cause now basically.
So it was more of big fight of two parts of public.
Prohibition was about criminalising alcohol, which I said was a bad idea. The problem was legalising alcohol in the first place, which would not have happened had we known then what we know now.
Also the SVD massacre was IMHO only tangentially associated with alcohol. It was part of a war between armed gangs, had it not been alcohol it would have been gambling, prostitution or something else.
I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public. Governments always meet a lot of resistance when they try to take away some given right.
As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
Pre-prohibition society dealt with alcohol in an extremely dysfunctional way, and the problems that prohibition addressed are now invisible. This sucks because it makes prohibition seem like a comically stupid policy, when really it was a great step forward and an overreaction to a serious problem.
Post prohibition we were left with the states being able to control liquor sales, and license liquor establishments. We were able to set a drinking age, establish three tier systems to separate the production, wholesale, and retail of alcohol, and alcohol was regulated and taxed nationally too.
These changes helped curb many of the most predatory abuses of the alcohol industry, and stopped other predatory industries from using alcohol as a way to immiserate their workers.
And if we were to re-introduce alcohol prohibition we would still have a massive alcoholism problem _in addition_ to a massive crime problem, a massive tax evasion problem, an even worse health problem due to lack of production oversight and a massive enforcement overhead. Legalisation and regulation doesn't fix the addiction problem, but prohibition makes everything so much worse.
Judging by already legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, the general trend in use has been downward for decades; for alcohol for over a century, except for Prohibition which caused an upward jiggle in the general trend. Before the first World War drunkeness was a major problem, and far more widespread than it is now.
And besides the whole rise of organized crime thing, it was a fabulous success!
Did you know that the customer warranty didn't exist before prohibition? People were generally so drunk that it wasn't considered a viable option to warranty your products because people would break them in their drunkenness.
Yeah, consumption went down, but it caused numerous other issues that proved to be far greater. All you’ve shown is that reduced consumption of alcohol reduces the metrics of social problems associated with alcohol. That says nothing to my point which is that the other problems end up being far greater when you go in with such a profoundly callous mindset. Prohibition caused a 24% increase in crime overall with murder in particular going up 13%. And at the end of Prohibition people still drank and we still have all the same issues with alcohol and drugs now, just worse. And then Reagan tried the same approach again, and it failed again. How many dead bodies do you wish to see on top of the 100k overdoses to somehow solve this issue? Would a stack of dead bodies twice as tall satiate? At some point we as a society gotta realize that murdering people en-masse as a response to social issues is just not effective.
People seem to forget that private ownership and consumption of alcohol was legal during the US prohibition (at the Federal level). You just had to buy it from Al Capone. We realized the problems that was causing then, but want to repeat them now.
The irony is that alcohol prohibition did actually work. It increased health, reduced violence in the home and on the street, increase safety for women and girls, decreased deaths and increased economic wealth amongst other benefits. It also (needless but I have to say it) increased organised crime which in the end overwhelmed the positives.
The problem was caused by the underlying political problems - namely, people didn't necessarily want to ban it, there was just a very ruthless political organisation that essentially destroyed any politicians who opposed the bans, regardless of what the constituents wanted. Politicians were forced to pass it.
If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.
From what I understand prohibition was the result of revolutionary drinking habits meeting up with increasing supplies of industrialized and cheap high alcohol beer and spirits.
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