Pros And Cons Of The Prohibition Movement

The prohibition movement shows that no matter what restrictions are put into place, if people want to do something, they will find a way to do it. Alcohol may have been banned nationwide, but that didn’t stop people from enjoying themselves and doing what they wanted to do. This same exact thing happens today as well.
The prohibition movement began with the idea of temperance, which was a sort of perfectionist movement. People thought of alcohol as something unfit for a pure society, and beginning with Massachusetts in 1838, states began passing laws to ban the production and sale of alcohol. Although Massachusetts quickly reverted the law after extreme unhappiness, other states attempted the same thing throughout the 1800s. The movement started
to pick up in 1906 when it was led by the Anti-Saloon League. Factory owners supported the idea as well to keep their factories safe. It never really got a chance to impact the whole country until the US entered World War I. As part of an act put into place to preserve supplies for war efforts, including grain, a temporary wartime prohibition was put into place in 1917. Later that same year, the 18th amendment to the constitution was passed by congress to ban the sale, transport, export, and import of alcohol. Interestingly, it didn’t actually ban the consumption of alcohol. It took only about a year for this amendment to be ratified by the states and was to take effect in January of 1920. It was generally thought that the 18th amendment would help the country far more than it would damage it, otherwise it never would have been put into place.
Crime would decrease, people would be safer, productivity would increase, everyone would be more healthy, the pros seemed as though they went on and on. The problem was that not everyone was okay with these changes. People still wanted to go out and drink, and this new amendment wasn’t enforced well enough to stop them from doing so. Places known as “Speakeasies” began to pop up which secretly and illegally produced and sold alcoholic beverages. There were plenty of loopholes in the law that even made it possible to produce and sell alcohol legally. While over the course of the decade, plenty of them were caught and shut down, there were still so many left standing that anyone who really wanted to go out and have a drink could do so. In summary, people thought that prohibition would boost the nation significantly, but while the amendment made it much more of a hassle to have an alcoholic beverage, it was still far from impossible to get your hands on one, and the law wasn’t cheap to
enforce.
While it seemed like a good idea at the time to put the 18th amendment in place, the amendment ended up not working out as well as people initially were convinced that it would.
For example, while crime was expected to decrease, due to so many people illegally buying and selling alcohol, crime increased greatly and gangs began to rise in big cities. Al Capone is the most notorious of them all, having made over $60 million every year from his bootlegging operations. This organized crime, along with numerous people who bought, sold, and produced alcohol illegally caused prisons to fill with people who had committed minor infractions. People also believed that everyone would become more healthy since they wouldn’t be drinking anymore, but people were still drinking all the time. Alcohol that was being illegally produced was actually much less safe. Drinks often had a higher alcohol level than drinks in the past from before the prohibition time. Thousands died every year in the 1920s due to poorly made alcohol. When the alcohol industry was stripped away in 1920, thousands of jobs were lost. The economy took a big hit due to so many businesses being destroyed, which caused the government to lose billions of dollars. Basically, everything that prohibition was supposed to solve ended up getting worse. Due to these numerous downsides to the amendment, people realized fairly quickly that it did far more harm than good, and needed to be repealed before more damage was inevitably
done. Congress eventually passed the 21st amendment in 1933 to revoke the 18th amendment and end the prohibition period.
Prohibition was meant to be a positive change for the nation. People would feel better about themselves and each other and the economy would boom. But this ended up not happening, and not only that, these changes taught us a valuable lesson. You can do all you want to ban certain things, but if people really want to get their hands on them, it isn’t very hard to do so. This same lesson still applies today with things like drugs and weapons. The government and laws can only control so much, but some things have to be left to the people to decide upon.