# Prohibition
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [September 7, 2016, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266 "2016-09-07T14:12:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 5
### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 10:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/81 "2016-09-08T10:28:48Z")
> [@Vicsage](#):
>
> The typical forum response. Ignore the facts presented , attack the poster and his motivations.
Did your OP present any facts? I saw some assertions, which may or may not be factual, but you don’t appear to have presented anything to back up those assertions which might compel a reader to accept them as facts.
Your posting/debating style on this board thus far does not amount to a strong recommendation for your assertions to be accepted as factual merely on your say-so.
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### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/82 "2016-09-08T10:31:30Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#):
>
> So…what is your “motivation”?
> [@running\_coach](#):
>
> See? That’s \*\*Vicsage’s \*\*problem. He was never serious about _the craft._
Word. He’s just not yes and-ing…
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### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/83 "2016-09-08T10:36:10Z")
> [@Vicsage](#):
>
> No, this thread is about people who believe they can impose their views and actions on other people because they may see it as the greater good (they can even be right). But when you use the same criteria to their vices or sacred cows they get upset and refuse to force the beneficial activities. So far no one has even addressed the number of lives lost by drinking. 88,000. I understand why. It causes them psychological and emotional pain to see their double standard. So they attack the messenger and ignore the message. The other point about prohibition not working, maybe we should have tried to fix why it didn’t work. Laws against many crimes are not that effective and are being broken all the time. Maybe we should just legalize things when people keep doing them.
When the mob starts shooting up the streeets of Chicago in turf wars over the lucrative trade in counterfeit vaccination certificates, the point you’re trying to make may begin to gain some validity.
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### Author:  [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/84 "2016-09-08T10:39:14Z")
It’s a troll monster. It doesn’t have motivation.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-T377A using Tapatalk
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### Author:  [@Isosleepy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isosleepy)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/85 "2016-09-08T11:35:02Z")
> [@Happy\_Fun\_Ball](#):
>
> Look, **Vicsage** or whatever you name is, drinking and driving is illegal. For a reason. Explicitly, drinking and driving is typically not a victimless crime. It effects me, my family, my friends. I have had friends die from drunk drivers.
>
> Now if you or **Gigobuster** or **Vinyl Turnip** wants to sit at home and drink yourself to death, I really don’t care. I mean it is sad that people do this, but you (I assume) are wearing big girl panties and can make your own decisions\*. I see no reason to ram my moral judgement down your throat.
>
> Finally, if you want to send your precious snowflake to my children’s school, I think it is fair of me to require that your precious snowflake is vaccinated against the more dangerous, contagious, or common diseases. Just like I think it is fair of you to require that my kid leaves her [Wasp injection knife](http://waspinjection.com/) in the car before attending English class with your kid. Its all about mitigation of risk to me and mine and you and yours. Now if you want to home school your precious snowflake so that he/she can’t infect my perfect children with his/her disgusting/filthy diseases than run rampant in your sickly household, it’s all good.
This post should’ve ended the thread by being the perfect answer to the OP whatever the OP’s reason for posting was or wasn’t.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/86 "2016-09-08T14:52:53Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#):
>
> Prohibition failed and was totally ineffective – banning an easily produced (or otherwise widely available) and highly desirable product will always fail. So why would you advocate for a policy that wouldn’t do anything to stop those 88,000 deaths? Education might help, and making treatment centers widely available, but banning alcohol won’t do anything.
Um, no. I like alcohol a lot and think our laws about it are too strict as they are (in some ways: in others they’re too loose), but everything I’ve seen on the subject suggests that Prohibition ‘worked’ quite well, if by ‘worked’ you mean reduced alcohol consumption. This paper estimates that alcohol consumption by the end of the Prohibition era was 30-40% lower than pre-Prohibition (it was 70% lower at the start and then rose to stabilize at 30% lower) and it’s in line with most of what else I’ve seen. It didn’t much increase until a decade after Prohibition was ended, but that’s to be expected: people who grow up without much exposure to alcohol are going to drink less as adults.
> **[Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition](https://www.nber.org/papers/w3675)**
>
> Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
I don’t think stopping people from drinking is the business of the state, but if that’s what you want to do, and you think it’s worth the cost, Prohibition did, kind of, ‘work’. Prohibition was ended at least in part for economic reasons, because the country was in a depression and alcohol represented a potential source of tax revenue.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/87 "2016-09-08T15:01:58Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#):
>
> This paper estimates that alcohol consumption by the end of the Prohibition era was 30-40% lower than pre-Prohibition
> […]
> Prohibition did, kind of, ‘work’.
Prohibition broke the back of heavy working-class and poor drinking, at the expense of spreading much heavier drinking into most classes, where it remained.
Huge alcohol use by one class was worth the Temperance efforts, but Prohibition spread a lower overall level of alcohol use and abuse across the population. Hard to say that it worked in any general sense. Like so many social experiments, it was tried, it messed things around, it left a different situation in its wake… but “worked” takes some selective interpretation.
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### Author:  [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/88 "2016-09-08T15:28:32Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#):
>
> Why is it that morons are the last to catch on?
How else would you define “moron”?
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### Author:  [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/89 "2016-09-08T15:40:33Z")
While American consumption rates did drop during Prohibition, before this they were fairly low compared to colonial days. The big drop in consumption happened over the period from 1820-1850. People were serious fucking drunks before then.
[ ](http://www.theathlete.org/drug-abuse/images/Fig5-8.jpg)
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/90 "2016-09-08T16:34:40Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#):
>
> Prohibition broke the back of heavy working-class and poor drinking, at the expense of spreading much heavier drinking into most classes, where it remained…
I’m not challenging you on that, but can I see a citation?
I don’t think Prohibition was a good idea, but when I say it worked, I mean just that consumption went down.
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### Author:  [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2016, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/91 "2016-09-08T20:21:57Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#):
>
> When the mob starts shooting up the streeets of Chicago in turf wars over the lucrative trade in counterfeit vaccination certificates, the point you’re trying to make may begin to gain some validity.
Precisely. Honestly, although I am no teetotaller, if we could pass a law that would eliminate alcohol from the world without any other negative consequence I’d be all for it. It is undeniable that alcohol consumption has an overall negative effect on society, but it is so ingrained in our society, easily produced, and addictive, that laws banning alcohol were found to be more trouble than they were worth. So, yes, even in the case of alcohol “people being forced to do things if there is a large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” makes sense, it’s just that prohibition didn’t actually create a “large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” so we gave it up.
Compulsory vaccination on the other had has a much better ratio of cost to benefit so it makes sense to pursue it.
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### Author:  [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/92 "2016-09-09T01:50:13Z")
> [@Chimera](#):
>
> While American consumption rates did drop during Prohibition, before this they were fairly low compared to colonial days. The big drop in consumption happened over the period from 1820-1850. People were serious fucking drunks before then.
>
> [http://www.theathlete.org/drug-abuse/images/Fig5-8.jpg](http://www.theathlete.org/drug-abuse/images/Fig5-8.jpg)
What the hell happened around 1825?
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### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/93 "2016-09-09T03:15:35Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#):
>
> _The Unteachables_ (2016)
> A learning-disabled man adopts a fictional online persona after discovering the password to his mother’s laptop computer.
_If they bring a “Cite?” You bring a sock puppet. If they send one of your opinions to a poll, you send one of theirs to the Pit._
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### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 8:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/94 "2016-09-09T08:40:54Z")
We should ban recreational satire.
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/95 "2016-09-09T09:38:42Z")
> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> What the hell happened around 1825?
Better water quality? Imported coffee got cheaper?
One reason for heavy beer consumption in the past was that the water was of such poor quality and sanitation it could make you ill or kill you. The beer was safer to drink. In fact in the definitive case where cholera was proven to be a water-borne disease it was the people drinking water that were ill and dying and the beer drinkers who were healthy.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/96 "2016-09-09T15:10:04Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#):
>
> So, yes, even in the case of alcohol “people being forced to do things if there is a large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” makes sense, it’s just that prohibition didn’t actually create a “large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” so we gave it up…
The cost vs. benefit of banning alcohol isn’t cut and dried, it’s in part a semi-subjective determination that depends on how much you value the benefits (social, economic, recreational etc.) or alcohol vs. how much you weigh the costs. At least some of those ‘costs’ did improve under prohibition. And prohibition was eventually overturned largely for economic reasons (to increase tax revenues) rather than because people looked at the increase in gang activity and decided that the costs were worse than the benefits.
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2016, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prohibition/765266/97 "2016-09-09T16:04:54Z")
> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> What the hell happened around 1825?
Lyman Beecher started preaching about the evils of booze and co-founded the American Temperance Society.
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