Distillation itself may have an extremely long history. But distilled spirits as a curiosity isn’t the same thing as a dirt cheap mass market product.
Alcoholic beverages go back to the neolithic, because all you need is to set some sugary liquid aside for a while, and you’ll get fermentation. So people have been drinking wine, beer, pulque, koumiss, mead, and cider and other shit for thousands of years. Even in Europe. But mass production of cheap distilled spirits wasn’t a thing until the 1600s.
There’s some evidence that different ethnic groups have different average reactions to alcohol. It’s probably likely that the “blue-eyed” link, if it exists, isn’t a direct causal relationship between genes that code for light eyes and genes that code for alcohol metabolism. It’s more likely to just be an accidental correlation. And by ethnic groups I’m more thinking of allele maps that vary clinally, rather than “white guy”, “black guy” and “asian guy”. Map frequency of blue eyes across the planet and get an allele map, then frequency of various enzyme types and get another allele map, and then compare map A to map B.
At first. Later on less so and by the time it was repealed there was no big immediate jump, though consumption was still below pre-prohibition levels and took another 10 yrs or so of being legal again to reach pre-pro’b levels. According to these guys: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675
That I find more doubtful. The conventional wisdom that prohibition’s big problem was in fostering organized crime and corruption has some obvious validity. What you mention might be another piece of the puzzle for the specific politics of repeal, I’d grant.
It’s somewhat like drugs now. A lot people insist on arguing about that simplistically, claiming for example that drugs being illegal (those which are) ‘doesn’t stop anyone, I can buy you that drug in your town right now’ etc. But this is clearly ridiculous. Of course keeping drugs illegal reduces drug use based on some balance of risks (of getting arrested, getting fired, from dealing with drug dealers, etc) v the satisfaction drugs give. And a lot of people follow the herd, lots of virtuous and vicious circles of social behavior. It’s a question how much does illegality reduce drug use and how much good that does compared to the side effects of enforcement (again organized crime and corruption, locking loads of people up*, undermining respect for law if particular laws become obviously unenforceable, etc). IOW saying it’s ‘like’ drugs doesn’t mean making alcohol or particular drugs illegal are obviously a good or bad idea without close study of the empirical specifics.
*who contrary to stereotype usually broke laws other than drug laws, even where people are nominally incarcerated just for a drug offences those might have been the only thing where the authorities had then dead to rights, not the only crime they committed as part of the illegal drug world. But arguably getting into the illegal drug world to begin with is what led them to those other crimes.
OK, thanks for the link. Flushing red isn’t the same as what I think of as an allergy. I often flush a little when I drink wine (but not with beer).
And I’ve drank with a lot of people from Japan. I’ve never seen any of them have this flushing. Maybe the folks that do flush avoid drinking with me when I’m over in Asia. I’m not kidding when I say that Japanese guys can drink an awful lot of alcohol and they don’t seem to be affected as much as Americans. Not sure why.
Prohibiting murder has, in general, been a success. Prohibiting alcohol was a complete failure, worse than just a failure in fact. This is because murder is unequivocally bad and every sane person disapproves of murder, while alcohol is both good and bad at the same time and its good qualities are very important to a lot of people. Prohibition failed because it’s stupid to ban a good thing, even a good thing with significant bad attributes.
It’s a matter of balance. The bad of alcohol does not outweigh the good, despite the pronouncements of prohibitionists. The bad of murder does outweigh the good.
Parsing the abstract is easy. It’s one preliminary paper on one set of research. That makes good headline bait, but those findings should never be taken seriously until replication and expansion is done. If you want a rare example of a true generalization, here it is: never base an argument or change your behavior because of one study.
Answering the question “Could this be why prohibition failed so violently?” is even easier. That’s a flat no. We’ve had many good threads on Prohibition, especially after the Ken Burns documentary. His major sources are easy to find. Burns depended heavily on Daniel Okrant’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition and Okrant depended heavily on Michael A. Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Both books are very good, though Lerner’s is more academic.
Anyway, the main sources of alcohol before 1920 that pushed the campaign against drinking were wine and beer. That was a change from the very early years, in which rum and whisky were more profitable because they concentrated the alcohol. But after the Civil War large numbers of breweries and wineries opened. Ironically, it was Prohibition that brought back distilled liquor because it again was cheaper to transport. Even so, wine and beer remained the main alcohol sources because they remained cheaper.
No connection can be made between Prohibition’s failure and the study’s alcohol dependence (AD). As noted above, alcoholism declined during Prohibition. It failed because it got passed only through some odd political alliances (mostly religion-based and heavily anti-immigrant) pushed through an extremely narrow victory. (And the revenue from alcohol excise taxes was no longer required to run the government after the income tax was constitutional.) Those alliances quickly fell apart, enforcement never was or could be properly financed, and wets were always in the majority. The rise of criminal syndicates - not just Italian, but of a variety of nationalities - made Prohibition-related crimes a national cause célèbre. Prohibition had as much chance of surviving long-term as the South had in winning the Civil War. The other side was initially surprised and overwhelmed but had all the numbers.
That wasn’t true as of ten years ago (17% blue eyed vs 13% African American), I doubt it’s changed that much in the last decade.
It’s true that white Americans drink more than Black Americans and that European countries drink more than other continents. I’m not sure what the causes of that might be.
Knowledge of distillation strongly suggests its use in making distilled alcoholic beverages – certainly that’s the chief use today (despite all the other uses it has), and it’s perverse to think it was diferent in earlier history, restricted to only a fe curtious academics.
Wine is fermented, not distilled. Distillation only became common in the Middle Ages. For what it’s worth, people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and locations have been consuming the hardest stuff they could concoct for as long as they’ve been able. And, obvious alert, more alcohol= more terrible behaviour
If you count Russia as in Europe but cultural acceptance, latitude and disposable income do have some correlations, but I am not aware of any great emperical mapping to cause.
I would bet cultural and religious taboos alcohol consumption are some of the highest factors.
One of the Pāli precepts is “I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.”
In the Quran, intoxicants are sometimes described as being temptations of satanic origin.
The Bible does have sections where due to drinking your son may see you nude or your daughters may rape you but in general it is more socially acceptable.
As the African American culture typically condones heavy alcohol use more often than those cultures of European origin I would personally place my bets on cultural acceptance.
African Americans don’t engage much in heavy alcohol use at all, nor do people in most of Africa. Alcohol consumption is highest in Northern Europe and in the US it’s highest among white Americans.
Sorry CalMeacham, but I remain stubbornly unconvinced partly due to dueling cites, especially around the Chinese :). But even if you were to convince me full distillation in general was a common and widespread method to produce booze pre-Middle Ages, the OP specified grain distillations and one of your own cites says: The earliest use of starchy grains to produce distilled spirits is not known, but their use certainly dates from the Middle Ages.
