100 years ago, yesterday, Prohibition went into effect.
It marks one of the first national attempts to ban something to get people to change their behavior.
Like most roads to Hell, it was paved in good intentions.
Not only did it even slow down people's drinking, it changed local gangsters into regional, and in some cases, national criminals.
Criminals who would murder each other to obtain and maintain market share. Criminals who, in the course of their conflicts, inflicted massive collateral damage on anyone in the area.
When it became clear that prohibition's unintended consequences were too large and worse than the drinking (which was unaffected by it) they repealed prohibition...
But the monster they created in the Mafia remained.
Slow clap.
The parallels with the war on drugs are many.
Local criminals are now multinational cartels.
Multinational cartels who will retain the wealth and power they accumulated thanks to the creation of a lucrative black market.
By the way, drug use is largely unaffected by its being illegal.
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If anything, Prohibition made drinking in America worse. As of about World War I, thanks to improvements in refrigeration and the large German influence, Americans were finally turning more to beer than straight whiskey. But beer was hard to get during Prohibition (home brewing had all but gone during the nineteenth century; it had been an essential housewife skill before then), bulky, and had a smaller profit margin on it than whiskey did, so habits turned backwards. After Prohibition, American beer was very weak and watery, (WWII played a part in this as well) and that was how it was until microbrews and home brewing came in.
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