Elder Ballard on Scouts, "“The reality there is we didn’t really leave them; they kind of left us,”

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

.........................

It reduced alcohol consumption, cirrhosis deaths fell. It massively reduced the drink until you pass out alcoholism that was a big problem in early America. One of the Founders was concerned that democracy would fail in a nation of alcoholics (though they called it by other names back then) and alcoholic psychosis was not rare at all. In the late 1700s it was common to drink rum or hard cider with every meal. Absenteeism was a big problem nationwide. Instead of coffee in the morning it was alcohol. The hard working abstemious Protestant farmer of the era is more the exception than the rule. They were drinking over twice as much in a year as current Americans.

This was very true, and my own farmer-ancestors prior to 1830 drank whiskey all day long.  Then all family members took the temperance pledge, just as a test mind you:  At year's end they found that they had saved a lot of money not spent on whiskey, their farms were better managed, and their wives and children were happier.  Being good Methodists, they got with the program, and haven't drunk since.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons used to drink booze.  They likewise gave it up.  One reason my Methodist father appealed to my Mormon mother was because he didn't drink or smoke.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

The idea that Prohibition did not work is mostly a myth.........

Organized crime violence increased at the same time as Prohibition was in effect (though how much of that came from alcohol production and distribution and how much came from increasing urbanization and the turmoil of the 20s is debated) but domestic violence fell. Murder rates fell. There were downsides to Probibition (poisonous homemade booze, contempt for law due to 

To the contrary, Prohibition was a disaster.  Do-gooders tried to legislate morality, but all they did was to enrich the gangsters, create contempt for law, and to incarcerate everyone and his brother.  Our modern anti-drug campaigns have done exactly the same, and made the USA the incarceration capital of the world -- which we cannot afford -- while at the same time not putting a dent in illegal drug sales.  And now the cartels have branched out into large scale weapons sales and human trafficking.  The stupidity of America has now made Mexico a failed state.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

The failure of Prohibition is a slogan now for drug legalization and has little basis in history. The Prohibition experiment upended drinking habits and is probably a factor in us drinking less then half as much alcohol as our ancestors 200 years ago were. I call that a win.

What is true of alcohol is also true of cigarettes.  Use of both has gone way down in the USA, but not because of prohibition, but because of more enlightened policies and spread of basic information.  The amount of use of both in some foreign countries is truly atrocious.  Alcohol causes an enormous death-rate in Russia even today, and the percentage of smokers among Jews and Arabs in the Middle East is extraordinary.  The medical costs are unbearable.

Quote

I should add that my desire to not legalize drugs IS NOT support for the current punishment model for drug offenses. Mandatory minimums and our national incarceration rate are a disgrace and a standing indictment against the idea that we are a free nation and the private prison industry and the politicians  and people that peddled them are even more of a national disgrace.

Well said.  In the end, however, you must choose a policy.  Which will it be?

[rchorse]

7 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

People actually do that. This is a pretty good popular piece on the subject that summarises some of the academic research. Some grabs:

Of course, the data are actually quite messy in some areas, such as crime stats, as the article points out. And even when we have stats, the issue of causation is difficult to pin down because more was going on in the 1920s than just Prohibition.

Here are some interesting data about current drinking patterns in the US:

This is simply not normal in many other nations. Mine, for example, has a non-drinking rate amongst adults of 3 per cent! Alcohol saturates every aspect of our culture and communal life. (I just looked it up, and on average each person over the age of 14 in our nation consumes 26 mL of pure alcohol per day! That's over two 'standard drinks' as we define it.) And with it comes astronomically high levels of family and domestic violence, road deaths, and suicide. Alcohol-related disease, increasingly including alcohol-related cancers, is one of the leading causes of death.

Enjoy your study!

This mirrors my experience in Germany exactly. Everybody drinks, and every form of socializing involves alcohol. Even childrens' birthday parties include at least beer for the adults and often hard liquor, as well. Sure, people drink in America, but it's not remotely comparable to Germany. I think many Germans that are considered normal social drinkers would be considered borderline alcoholics in the US.

[cacheman]

14 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Thank you. I didn't have time to get to this, but the historian in me has been cringing at the baseless comments that have been made. America's period of Prohibition was so effective, in fact, that rates of alcohol consumption still haven't returned to pre-Prohibition levels, and the percentage of adult Americans who are complete non-drinkers has remained impressively large -- 10 times greater than where I live now!

???  I guess if you consider the early to mid 1800's as your pre-prohibition data point, then it's true that the rate of consumption in the US hasn't returned to pre-prohibition levels.  But, if you look at the levels in the decade before prohibition, then the current rates are much higher.  In 1919 (the year before prohibition), the per capita consumption rate was 0.8 gallons.  That rate dropped significantly in 1920 when prohibition was enacted.  Within nine years, the rate was well over the 1919 pre-prohibition rate (1.3 gallons). The current per capita rate in the US is nearly triple the 1919 rate and still well above the global average. 

Also....Your claim that the number of non-drinkers in your former country is 10 times greater than your current country does not square with the data that I've seen.