End of Prohibition column

Some establishments were promoting a special 1933 brew this past week. These establishments and breweries were celebrating the end of Prohibition on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21^st Amendment. It repealed the 18^th, Prohibition’s change to the Constitution a bit more than a decade before.

Prohibition was the culmination of a long moral and social crusade. America has from its beginning had alcohol problems. Alcohol binges led to family abuse and placing families in economic jeopardy. “If a family or a nation is sober, nature in its normal course will cause them to rise to a higher civilization. If a family or a nation…is debauched by liquor, it must decline and ultimately perish.” (Rep. Richmond Hobson).  A long campaign of hectoring those who drank alcohol as moral brutes did not lead to much change. AA learned this well as it organized a couple of years after the 21^st Amendment with its language of disease instead of morality imposed by others.

To some degree it worked. Different measures indicate that alcohol consumption did drop. For instance cirrhosis deaths declined as did infant mortality and arrests for public intoxication and intake to facilities for alcoholism. Poisoned/ “Denatured” alcohol from industrial alcohol production led to around 10,000 deaths during prohibition.

We usually act from mixed motives. Ethnic prejudice, especially in the WWI era fed into the passage of the 18^th. Economic analysis made a case for increased I efficiency and productivity if alcohol production and distribution were banned.

Three groups could avoid the dictates of the law’s enforcement. Physicians could prescribe alcohol. Indeed pages of prescription books were filled with nothing other than whiskey prescriptions to the tune of over 40 mullion dollars. Walgreen’s expanded, perhaps due in part, to its new soda fountain offerings, but its alcohol prescriptions and perhaps more. Farmers could “preserve” their crops with alcohol production, such as hard cider. Grape production increased in California for the sale of grape bricks, where people were warned not to let it sit in a jug for more than 24 days. Finally, sacramental wine was maintained. One report alleged a church ordering so much sacramental wine that it seemed to mean that it had Communion 24 hours a day, with a communion cup apparently being a bottle.

Its proponents envisioned that crime would decrease with Prohibition, but instead, crime rose, sometimes at alarming rates. Over time, the law was flouted more and more. Sam Bronfman, of Seagram’s made a fortune smu8ggling alcohol through his agents. As an old man, he was asked about making a fortune in the 1920s. His reply: “you people were thirsty.” Organized crime took over illegal distribution, as we are aware form gangster movies. Bathtub gin was a staple at parties. President Harding routinely ignored the law at white House functions. As time passed, flouting the law became more common, and homemade hard liquor was outpacing the lesser proof wine and beer. Women were growing more free in alcohol consumption, now the taint of the saloon became extinct.

(An entertaining and learned account of Prohibition’s failures is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call.)

We do well to reflect on Prohibition and unforeseen, unexpected, unanticipated consequences.  We do well to consider the difference in our campaign against the public health menace of cigarettes as opposed to the public health menace of drug addiction. This could also mark a way forward in dealing with the disaster of gun violence as a public health and safety menace. (Oh, that’s right; in a repeat of the gag rule we are not to consider gun violence as part of a public health research program). A combination of moral suasion, self-interest, health concerns, and regulation seems to have more potent force than criminalizing accepted or permitted activity of long standing. In this country, a collision of private rights with the public good seems to cede advantages to private preferences.