I’m on a bit of a prohibition-era research fix. Since I live near Windsor, which is location with a very rich prohibition-era history of its own, this research is infused with a lot of interesting local history.

In my view, government laws prohibiting alcohol were bad

1. because it restricted a legitimate liberty (potential for abuse, no doubt, but still legitimate)
2. it was ineffective – it did not reduce use or abuse of alcohol
3. it mislead people to look to the wrong solution for vices–the government not the gospel
4.  it created an environment that was infested with cartels and violent crime.

Did Prohibition Work?

Before getting to statistics regarding the effectiveness of prohibition, I would like to note that its been demonstrated that the alcohol available during prohibition was of lower quality (and more dangerous) than the alcohol before and after prohibition. Some have placed the difference at around 20%. The death rate from liquor was over 4 times higher in 1925 than it was in 1920 (before prohibition). One researcher also said that “The typical beer, wine, or whiskey contained a higher percentage of alcohol by volume during Prohibition than it did before or after”.

Here is a chart showing the per capita use of alcohol in the U.S. measured in gallons of pure alcohol from 1910-1929. Prohibition was enacted in 1922 and continued past the end of the range of time showed in this chart.

Source: Clark Warburton: The Economic Results of Prohibition (Columbia University Press, 1932)

I think this shows that prohibition really didn’t make any really substantial change to the drinking habits of Americans, especially not after it was around for a few years and people got used to the laws.

Well, one might say, that doesn’t look so bad. But a look at expenditures on distilled spirits ( as a % of total alcohol sales) is far more clear in showing how ineffective prohibition is in stopping the more potent forms of alcohol. It also gives us an idea of how prohibition actually encouraged harder forms of drinking. Evidence shows that the use of beer (as opposed to harder forms of alcohol) declined quite a bit during prohibition. Here is what percentage of alcohol sales were harder spirits:

Source: Clark Warburton: The Economic Results of Prohibition (Columbia University Press, 1932)

But most relevant to this post, is the fact that the murder rate clearly shows that in the prohibition-era there was an increased rate of murders and the repeal of prohibition brought it back to its old rates.

Source: Clark Warburton: The Economic Results of Prohibition (Columbia University Press, 1932)

Homicide rates reached their peak in 1933 (the year of prohibition repeal) and fell dramatically by 1940.  Of course, other factors may have been occurring. But fundamentally prohibition was accompanied by an increase of various types of crime.

I’m sure more extensive statistics could be shown, but this is just a brief look at the general trends.

A Repeatedly Proven Way To End Cartel Violence: Case In Point, The Purple Gang

Street executions are not an invention of Mexican cartels.  They are using, albeit more regularly and effectively, the tactics that alcohol prohibition era gangsters used many years ago. The Purple Gang, a Michigan based gang during the prohibition era, was gruesome. If you crossed them back then, this is what happened to you:

The Purple Gang is said to be behind some 500 or so murders. Hijackings and public executions were a common strategy of theirs. They operated with near immunity from police action.

While the state was supposedly protecting society from alcohol, The Purple Gang flourished and perpetrated its violence. However, as soon as the police stopped arresting people for alcohol related “crimes”, a move which many at the time claimed would be the downfall of society, in actual fact, was a major reason why the Purple Gang lost its steam.

“what really signaled the end of the Purple Gang was the abolition of Prohibition…On April 3, 1933, Michigan became the first state to vote for the repeal of the federal Prohibition law. On April 7, Prohibition was officially over in Michigan. There was no longer any need for bootleggers and whiskey smugglers. The millions of dollars in liquid profits that had made the…thugs one of the most feared and powerful gangs in Detroit’s history dried up overnight.  The Purple Gang’s bloody bootlegging, dynasty had come to an abrupt end.” – Mobsters & Rumrunners of Canada: Crossing the Line by Gord Steinke

Some Conclusions Which Seem Reasonable

1. It is a bit odd to complain about gang violence while simultaneously advocating stricter and stricter measures of prohibition. It has been repeatedly proven (through historical analysis, statistics, and loads of anecdotal evidence) that the more prohibition you have the more gang violence you have. They go almost strictly hand in hand, and history has shown this repeatedly. While they don’t like being given trouble the police, every organized crime boss knows that his business is intimately dependent on the prohibition of the goods he is dealing. However, it seems that when prohibitionistic laws are instituted, it appears that this factor does not enter the analysis. Much attention is paid to the benefit this sort of law “could” bring, while it is ignored that that sort of law has never been show to actually bring that benefit and it also brings the disadvantage of creating a market for dangerous cartels.
2. Not only do illegal things become more “cool” to certain type of people, the more risky it is to distribute and the more scarcity, the more incentive there is to get into the business (and to try to attain a monopoly on it via very violent means). You can see this very vividly illustrated in the Mexican cartel situation.
3. From a Christian worldview, whatever you think of prohibition, you must at the very least acknowledge that prohibition only attempts to reform behavior externally and can’t be a satisfying solution to the problem. Any form of substance abuse is tied to human sinfulness, and while laws are designed to prevent human sinfulness from hurting others, it can’t reform people or eliminate human sinfulness. Until hearts change, people will always be seeking to abuse things. And if you outlaw one thing, they will either find a way to get it illegally or find another thing to abuse that is legal and available. So even supposing alcohol prohibition were necessary (which I would vigorously contest), the “social gospelers” and others who put their hopes in prohibition were totally wrong and off base in their belief that this was the way to transform society. A particularly despicable testimony to this is the quote from Billy Sunday when he bombastically said that because of the institution of prohibition “[t]he reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”    Billy Sunday was ignorant not only of the ineffectiveness of prohibition, but also the Biblical teaching about evil not coming from outside towards the inside, but rather from the inside towards the outside. He was ignorant as to what it is that transforms the heart.
4. As a Christian, I maintain that only the Gospel could transform society in a way that eliminates vices. And so, while the state restrains people from crimes, vices are best addressed by the preaching of (and transformation rooted in) the gospel. And so it is dangerous (and self defeating) to put hopes in prohibitionistic laws (even if we were to grant that they should be in place, we should not confuse necessity with effectiveness). One could dispute over the necessity of prohibition (and argue back and forth about the evidence), but it is clear and indisputable that it is ineffective. Only the Gospel is effective. Billy Sunday was dangerously taking that transformations that can only occur by the grace of God and wrongly applying them to a political vote to enact a law.  In the Biblical view, the law of God almighty doesn’t even transform people’s hearts in that way (let alone the law of sinful politicians). No, prohibition didn’t wipe away anyone’s tears (in fact it added many new ones), only the gospel can do that, and even with the gospel, it is not until heaven that the Christian worldview claims all tears will be finally and totally wiped away.
5. While there is a heavy cost to widespread abuse of dangerous things, there is also a heavy cost to turning these potentially dangerous things into scarce commodity by making them illegal. So a relevant question would be: If we know making something illegal is going to have the fairly certain result of X extra murders and Y additional public safety risk (due to cartel activity), at what point would society have to say “enough is enough, maybe making it illegal would help in some ways, but its not worth the extra gang activity”?   Just to put this in concrete terms: if prohibition of alcohol in the 1920′s was geared towards saving the public from the bad affects of alcohol abuse, how many cold-blooded murders related to alcohol-smuggling gangs would have to happen where it gets to the point where any positive societal gain from the law becomes a moot point compared to the societal loss due to the ills of the pronounced presence of violent cartels which make their living off the law?
6. Connected to #5, people making laws about substances should realize that a law will not stop these substances, it will just drive them underground. And they should factor into their thought process an analysis which accounts for the fact that, given that no law will stop the abuse of this substance, how will my making of a law change the nature of the use of the substance and the conditions connected to it. Ignoring this was a major blunder of the prohibition-era law makers. They were so enthralled by the negative effects of alcohol abuse that they forgot that a law would not stop alcohol abuse–it would merely change the ways in which it was used, the ways in which it was distributed, the ways in which it was made. And many of those changes were extremely negative.