Between 1920 and 1933, the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol was made illegal in the United State because of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution. By 1920, many of the states had already banned alcohol and many local governments kept those dry laws long after the 18th Amendment was repealed with the 21st Amendment. To this day, many local governments throughout our country have dry laws on the books. As in the 1920s, these local governments believe that the best way to deal with the problems of alcoholism is to ban alcohol completely. These local governments have more success than the country as a whole did during the 1920s, however, because Prohibition at the national level had a number of unintended consequences.
Obviously, the 18th Amendment cost the United States thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of tax revenue annually. Although this is something that the government realized would happen when it made alcohol illegal, it is something that hurt the country by the time of the Great Depression. Indeed, one of the reasons for the repeal of Prohibition was the government’s need to generate additional tax revenue and create jobs in the wake of the great Depression.
Ironically, beginning a few years into Prohibition, more people died of alcohol related deaths than had died when alcohol was legal. The reason for this was two fold. First, alcohol being illegal encouraged those who sold bootlegged alcohol to make strong alcohol like gin and whisky instead of beer or wine. The stronger the alcohol, the easier it was to distribute and conceal. Thus, many people got turned onto hard liquor by Prohibition. At the same time, because this alcohol was being made illegally, it was often dangerous for consumption. It was often made in bathtubs and other similar non-professional places by non-professionals. Thousands of people died every year from consuming moonshine or bootlegged liquor.
Prohibition also provided organized crime with a great source of income. Gangsters like Al Capone made millions of dollars selling bootlegged liquor to the public in one of the numerous speakeasies that sprang up across the country. As a natural consequence of the large profits that could be made in bootlegging, gangs fought violent turf wars with each other that killed thousands. By the end of Prohibition, the Federal population had increased more than 300% as had crime in virtually all categories, especially violent crime.
Too many people simply refused to abide by the law and there were not enough police officers in the country to make sure they did it. The Justice Department never had more than 2,500 agents to enforce Prohibition although enforcements cost more than a hundred times what was expected. In the end, most people decided that the unintended consequences of Prohibition were not worth the meager good that it did, so Prohibition ended in 1933. By then, however, the damage was done. The US had permanently lost 14 of the 23 breweries it had in 1919 and had lost many of its best wine collections and vineyards. In some ways, the alcohol industry has yet to recover.
References
Digital History
Wikipedia
The University at Albany
