Negative Space: alcohol
- Across the River and into the Trees
- Liquor flowed easily across the border between Canada and Detroit. One way or another the liquor was going to get across, so the police joined in for a piece of the take. Prohibition was a jobs program for criminals, employing tens of thousands of people to bring liquor to Michigan. And in a taste of things to come, free from the law sellers began targeting schoolchildren.
- Africans and Alcohol
- Surveys of African cultures indicates that societies that drink more have fewer alcoholics. Some of the indicators of a healthy relationship with alcohol seem to be viewed through biased lenses: as though, if seen among the Irish or Italian immigrants, would be considered indicators of an unhealthy relationship. I wonder, for example, what a researcher would say about Irish giving their children beer before they’ve been weaned.
- Against the Flowing Tide: Whiskey and Temperance in the Making of Modern Ireland
- George Bretherton follows the growth of temperance in Ireland, both among protestants and Catholics.
- Alcohol and Culture
- David G. Mandelbaum notes that alcoholism appears to be tied to societies which do not expect men to get drunk. Further, whether alcohol uplifts or depresses is tied to cultural expectations.
- Alcohol and the State in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
- Hermann Fahrenkrug’s shows that, to the Nazi leadership, it was the civic duty of every German to maintain good health in order to support state power.
- Alcohol as a Contributing Factor in Social Disorganization: The South African Bantu in the Nineteenth Century
- Bertram Hutchinson sees, among the Bantu, the same problems we saw during our own alcohol prohibition, and still see for other forms of prohibition.
- Alcohol in Asia
- Asia is a large area, and alcohol usage patterns vary widely throughout; they also share the recreational drug stage with other drugs.
- Alcohol In Its Cultural Context
- Alcohol helps strengthen the societies that use it. It facilitates social interaction, and allows individuals within the group to make observations and perform tasks that they would otherwise be forbidden to do.
- Alcohol information archive
- The dangers of alcohol, and the even more insidious dangers of alcohol prohibition.
- Alcohol prohibition archive
- A few files about that dangerous time when drugs were illegal!
- Alcohol Use by North American Indians
- The relationship between a culture and the drug use of its enemies is a complex one.
- Alcohol Use in Euro-American Societies
- Among the interesting bits here is a catfight between William Madsen and Patricia O. Sadler on whether or not Alcoholics Anonymous is a “crisis cult” and can reasonably be compared to them. Otherwise, what we’ve got here is why the Irish drink, why the Jews don’t, and why the French are good at it.
- Alcohol Use in the Pacific Islands
- Europeans introduced fermentation and distillation to Pacific islands, from roots to oranges to coconuts.
- Alcoholism and Medicine
- World War I helped further understanding that the effects of alcohol depended on how much was consumed, not what kind was consumed: men around the world came under the examination of doctors as they entered the military. This realization didn’t come quickly enough to save absinthe, however, and the drink fell mostly out of use in favor of other spirits.
- Alcoholism and the Irish
- Dermot Walsh quotes someone named McCarthy about the Irish love of a ruined drunk. If this were some ethnographic monograph on a far away jungle tribe, saying “drink is the synonym for hospitality” would be something taken literally.
- The Antiliquor Response: The Origins of the Temperance Movement
- It wasn’t long before democratic government attracted “stewards”: politicians who “honestly thought that they knew best how to order the affairs of others”.
- Appendix: Apparent Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages
- Apparent Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages and Absolute Alcohol in Each Class of Beverage, in U.S. Gallons per Capita of the Drinking-age Population, U.S.A. 1790-1978
- Bad Beer and “Hot Waters”: The First American Beverages
- As the settlers settled, they turned to local ingredients or planted foreign fruits in order to make applejack, mead, perry, and peach brandies.
- Beer as a Locus of Value among the West African Kofyar
- Robert McC. Netting sees no drinking problem among the Kofyar, who begin drinking before they are weaned. They mark their calendar by the brewing period and find beer at the end of the rainbow.
- Beliefs, Behaviors, & Alcoholic Beverages
- Subtitled “A Cross-Cultural Survey”, Mac Marshall (University of Michigan, 1979 ) collects essays on the use of alcohol in cultures throughout the world. Perhaps surprisingly, even the intoxicating effects of alcohol appear to be more a matter of psychology than of actual physiological changes.
- Benevolent Repression: Popular Culture, Social Structure, and the Control of Drinking
- Joseph Gusfield focuses on the repression of prohibition, and the perspective that allows it. What is this “personal liberty” that the opposition speaks of?
- Can marijuana replace alcohol?
- Some evidence shows that for people who have used marijuana, alcohol becomes a lesser drug. Getting drunk is more degrading than getting high. Some of this is circumstantial, however, for example the beer distributors deciding that when beer sales drop it must mean that a marijuana “shipment” arrived somewhere.
- Capitalism, Religion, and Reform: The Social History of Temperance in Harvey, Illinois
- Ray Hutchison writes about the “conflicts between divergent subcultures in American society” that would eventually result in prohibition. Temperance communities may have been about keeping alcohol out, or they may have been about keeping Eastern Europeans out.
- The Cartoon Guide to Recreational Drugs (213.7 KB)
- The Birds and the Bees do it, Pigs and Porcupines do it. But evidence suggests that humans are champion drug users. We are born with a natural urge to alter our consciousness. Children spin until they drop for the same reason that their parents drink alcohol. Nature requires it.
- Changes in Japanese Drinking Patterns
- Margaret J. Sargent writes about drinking and sociability in post-war Japan; she also mentions in passing that the “bad” alcohol was made by disliked foreigners, in this case Koreans.
- The Cheerful Spring
- Prohibition is that rare law that benefits those who disobey it. In Detroit, underworld figures were soon able to afford diamond rings and fancy cars. But, after all, such people were merely “aliens of the lowest type.”
- Clinical and Biological Considerations
- Following the demise of prohibition, serious study of alcohol’s effects brought a greater understanding of how alcohol affects health and awareness.
- Conclusions
- Mac Marshall summarizes that alcohol is popular for parties all over the world, that men have more problems than women, and that modern societies produce more significant amounts of pathological behavior than pre-industrial societies. Oh, and prohibition never works.
- Consensus: The Anti-Saloon League and the End of Pluralism
- Heh. The biggest news story since World War I, and the New York Times didn’t recognize the importance of it.
- The Cultural Structure of Mexican Drinking Behavior
- William Madsen and Claudia Madsen write that pulque took on, and continues to take on, a ritual aspect.
- Daru and Bhang: Cultural Factors in the Choice of Intoxicant
- G. M. Carstairs in 1951 researched the usage patterns between alcohol (daru) and marijuana (bhang) in Rajasthan, India. There was also some mention of opium among the respondents. Bhang tended to be used for worship, and daru (and opium) for driving away fear. Warriors preferred daru, and Bramin preferred bhang.
- Decay from Within: The Inevitable Doom of the American Saloon
- Madelon Powers notes that it was the existing decline of the saloon that may have made prohibition possible.
- The Decline of Temperance
- Prohibition killed temperance.
- Depressants
- Alcohol is the most popular recreational drug in the world, and probably the earliest. Oh, and here’s a safety tip: no nitrous while driving.
- Drier and Drier, and Wetter and Wetter: Drinking and the Pluralist Renaissance
- Prohibition lobbyists screamed that liberalizing drinking laws would mean blood in the streets; but ending prohibition on alcohol didn’t increase violence or crime any more than liberalized concealed carry has. But fears of angry drunken blacks didn’t stop repeal, and the day after prohibition ended was just another day.
- Drinkers and Reformers: The Origins of Postbellum Temperance
- When voters start doing things you don’t like, call them unpatriotic and their actions a danger to public morals. Nineteenth-century prohibition advocates sound like Reagan-era prohibition advocates when they argue that people who use recreational drugs responsibly are a danger to the nation: they set a poor example. It’s a circular argument: they set a poor example because drinking is bad; their drinking is bad because it sets a poor example.
- Drinkers in Antiquity
- Every culture with sugar seems to have developed some kind of alcoholic drink, from honey-mead to fermented grapes and other fruits. Once they develop alcohol, they develop laws to deal with alcohol and drinking.
- Drinking and Attitudes toward Drinking in a Muslim Community
- J. Midgley surveys Cape Town and finds that the low rates of reported drinking among the Muslim community match “previous findings”.
- Drinking Habits
- Like sex, social drinking shows signs of being a human need. The local bar fulfills the need that the nightly campfire did in older times.
- Drinking in America: A History
- Mark Edward Lender & James Kirby Martin. The Free Press, New York, 1982. Seems almost pro-prohibition, and definitely pro-temperance, possibly even pro-legal-system-controlled temperance.
- Drinking in Modern America
- I wonder how much it would cost nowadays to re-enact and enforce alcohol prohibition? It would, I suspect, dwarf prohibition of little drugs like marijuana and probably even cocaine.
- Drinking in the Sober Republic: Did Prohibition Prohibit?
- I’m not sure what he’s trying to say here; death rates by cirrhosis make no sense without also knowing how long it takes cirrhosis to develop.
- Drinking Patterns and Alcoholism in the Chinese
- K. Singer surveys alcohol use and the perception of use in China and Hong Kong during and after World War II. As the center of the illegal opium trade, narcotics were a bigger problem in Hong Kong than alcohol.
- Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History
- Susanna Barrows and Robin Room edit this 1991 collection of articles on the history of drinking in modern culture.
- Drunks, Brewers, and Chiefs: Alcohol Regulation in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1939
- Charles H. Ambler writes about the rise of prohibition in colonial Kenya; as is often the case, prohibition was meant to keep other races from partaking of recreational drugs.
- Dry Debacle
- Presaging what was to end national prohibition, state interest in prohibition faded whenever there were real problems to deal with, such as slavery and secession.
- The Dry Offensive: The 1870s and 1880s
- From its beginnings, state-run public education was used as a means of shaping policy by indoctrinating students towards a particular view.
- The Effects of Alcohol on the Fetus
- Eileen M. Fury writes that the fetus may stay drunk longer than the mother. Originally from Exceptional Children, Volume 49, 1982, pages 30-34.
- The End of an Era
- I suspect that while the “new” drinks did come with fewer social norms to control their usage, we were also seeing worries about the drugs that other people use, especially those other people who couldn’t afford beer and wine.
- The Epidemiology of Alcoholic Cirrhosis in Two Southwestern Indian Tribes
- S. J. Kunitz, J. E. Levy, C. L. Odoroff, and J. Bollinger discover that, just as for Europeans during alcohol prohibition, prohibition of alcohol in reservations does not reduce the dangers of alcohol.
- Epilogue: The Age of Ambivalence
- Following repeal, alcohol sales helped pay our way out of the Great Depression.
- The Exceptions: Indians and Blacks
- Whites were not allowed to sell liquor to blacks; and Europeans quickly took on an a paternal attitude at best towards the Natives.
- Forms and Pathology of Drinking in Three Polynesian Societies
- Edwin M. Lemert writes that the use of kava provided a pattern for alcohol consumption throughout Polynesia. As in other societies, it tended to be limited to use by men.
- From Fasting to Abstinence: The Origins of the American Temperance Movement
- Joel Bernard writes about the “cranky fad” of enforced temperance: how it came to be so popular. Racism, of course, figured strongly.
- From Reform to Reaction: The Sober Republic at Bay
- What’s fascinating to me is how much we’ve changed since repealing alcohol prohibition: there was once a time when appeal to racism did not suffice to keep bad laws. The calls for killing drug users when the drug was alcohol match almost exactly modern rhetoric. From adding poisons to the drug, to increasing penalties far beyond the bounds of the crime, we’ve seen all this before.
- From Symbolic Exchange to Commodity Consumption: Anthropological Notes on Drinking as a Symbolic Practice
- Marianna Adler’s portion “draws on historical accounts of drinking in British society in an effort to shed light on the symbolic nature of drinking in modern Western societies.”
- From the Enlightenment to Magnus Huss, 1700-1850
- The rise of drinking, especially of distilled liquors, brought with it class concerns: the upper classes thought the lower classes couldn’t hold their drink. Slaves and Indians were forbidden from drinking, though such laws were usually ignored. The deleterious effects of alcohol consumption began to be more fully quantified.
- Genes, Personality and Alcoholism
- Some people may inherit a vulnerability to a severe form of alcoholism. Constance Holden, Psychology Today, January 1985, pp. 38-44.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- By Herbert Asbury, this “informal history” of alcohol prohibition is as good an argument against the prohibition of recreational drugs as any written.
- The Great Jewish Drink Mystery
- Mark Keller attempts to unravel the mystery of why Jews don’t drink to excess while the Irish do.
- Helping the Fallen
- There is a danger, if the goal is to help people, of making their activities something they want to hide.
- Hillsboro, Ohio, 1873
- Early public protests took forms we recognize today as sit-ins and demonstrations such as those used by anti-war protesters and anti-abortion protesters.
- A History of Alcoholism
- Jean-Charles Sournia’s book contains the immortal (in my pages, anyway) quote, “It would seem that if alcohol is a vice, then virtue is unattractive, and if drinking is a malady, then good health alone is not enough to satisfy man.”
- Holy and Unholy Spirits: The Effects of Missionization on Alcohol Use in Eastern Micronesia
- Mac Marshall and Leslie B. Marshall note the interplay between alcohol use and traditional kava use on the arrival of European missionaries.
- How French Children Learn to Drink
- Barbara Gallatin Anderson argues that the French are thick when it comes to wine, and that people don’t understand that when the government says wine is bad for children, that also includes watered-down wine. More likely, they just don’t trust their government.
- Immigration and Antebellum Drinking
- German immigrants adapted their favorite lagers to the needs of native-born Americans, resulting in the “light-bodied, golden brew popular today”.
- Inebriate Reformatories in Scotland: An Institutional History
- Patrick M. McLaughlin’s study did not provide anything for my cartoon history, so all I am left with is this tantalizing quote.
- The Inebriate, the Expert, and the State
- Once we bring state power into temperance, it becomes something wholly different and dangerous.
- Intemperance: The Lost War Against Liquor
- Larry Englemann’s Intemperance is a great history of prohibition. The bumper sticker “Don’t shoot, I’m not a bootlegger” could just as well be transported to homes today for overeager, paranoid police: “Don’t shoot, I’m not a drug dealer.” Companies such as Ford fired people based on their opposition to prohibition. And people claim heaven if we just step up enforcement.
- Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise
- Ronald K. Siegal hypothesizes that, along with sex, food, and sleep, that intoxication is a basic, natural need in humans. He makes a strong case that recreational drug use is not just something that people like to do, it is something that humans require to survive.
- The Keeley Cure
- Glycerine? Coca? Strychnia? Taken every two hours?
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
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If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Magnus Huss and Alcoholism, 1807-1890
- Magnus Huss, physician to Swedish kings, first coined the word “alcoholism” as part of a systematic study of the deleterious effects of alcohol. Other scientists reading Huss’s work realized that the same effects could be seen resulting from beer and wine consumption.
- The Many Worlds of Drink in Europe and America
- Drinking in the western world was heavily influenced by the public house: the bar, tavern, or saloon.
- Metamorphosis: From “Good Creature” to “Demon Rum,” 1790-1860
- Desire for temperance led to desire for the complete abstinence from liquor; from liquor abstinence arose desire for abstinence from any alcoholic beverage. From calls for abstinence there arose calls for discouragement and finally prohibition.
- Modern Alcoholism
- Alcohol use has played a significant role in film from its birth. Before prohibition, temperance melodramas showed it as a cause of distress and anguish; later, film noir made both alcohol (and smoking) into on-screen signifiers. Our choice of which drugs to prohibit is often inconsistent: even in its natural form alcohol is more dangerous than the concentrated forms of other, still illegal, drugs.
- New Insights into Alcoholism
- From somewhere in Time Magazine in 1983, perhaps? But I couldn’t find a more specific attribute.
- The New Society, Booze, and Social Disorder
- Like those who promise to leave the country when the other candidate is elected president, Ford did not stop automobile production when repeal ended prohibition.
- Not Quite Dry: Neorepublicans in a Changing America
- Prohibition itself stimulated drinking as a status-based consumer activity.
- Notes on Drinking in Japan
- Bufo Yamamuro writes that Buddhism preached complete abstinence from “strong drink”. Japanese mythology appears to have considered alcohol almost a weapon and they had several abortive bouts with prohibition.
- The Paradox of Temperance: Blacks and the Alcohol Question in Nineteenth-Century America
- Denise Herd writes about the “paradox” that the progressive temperance movement was also highly racist. The “negro problem” was was a “central issue” that prohibition was meant to solve.
- Perspectives on Drinking and Social History
- Despite its obvious silliness, prohibition has at times been, and continues to be, a popular response to recreational drug use. Why, and how?
- Plain & Fancy in the seventies with Hiram Walker
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Enjoy a whole new world of fun, excitement and discovery in Hiram Walker Cordials, adding a personal touch to all your memorable moments and special occasions—plain or fancy!
- Plymouth, 1621
- Alcoholic beverages were a health necessity to the first European immigrants, who didn’t understand at first that water could also be a beverage.
- Politics, Ideology, and Power
- Alcohol regulation, social reform, and temperance movements each had their different successes and failures.
- Portland, Maine, 1851
- Portland’s mayor Neal Dow was among the first to confuse virtue (temperance) with law (prohibition).
- The Posttemperance Response
- Saying that Alcoholics Anonymous is more impressive than other approaches doesn’t say much unless we know how well these other treatments work.
- The Praises and Prejudices of Wine
- Bruce S. Lane’s quotes provide a fascinating collection of historical, religious, and literary quotes about the wonders of wine. However, I’m not sure how trustworthy they are. I’d double check before using any of these.
- Problem-Drinking and the Integration of Alcohol in Rural Buganda
- Michael C. Robbins finds among the Buganda the same as among Europeans and Americans, that when societies drink to get drunk, they will have an alcohol problem, and when they drink to be friendly, they don’t. Watch out for those “Irish, mestizos, Irish-Americans, and Italian-Americans”.
- Prohibition in Action
- As long as people want to drink, prohibition is unenforceable. And criminals who accumulated money and power from their prohibition earnings were left alone by law enforcement in favor of small-time criminals with less ability to bribe and coerce. They even a form of three-strikes laws that gave life imprisonment for a pint’s worth of alcohol.
- Prohibition Politics
- The politics of prohibition, from alcohol to marijuana. Includes “Why End Prohibition?” and “The Pocket Guide to Recreational Drugs”.
- Prosperity, Liberty, and Lower Taxes: The Story of Repeal
- By 1929, people began to tire of “lawlessness, bootlegging, hijacking, poison-whiskey selling, shooting innocent citizens, gin parties attended by innocent high school girls and boys and rum parties attended by dry agents and other hypocrites, and of huge sums spent futilely in vain attempts to control men’s appetites by legislation.” Democrats sloganed with “Roosevelt and Repeal”.
- Public Health, Public Morals, and Public Order: Social Science and Liquor Control in Massachusetts, 1880-1916
- Thomas F. Babor and Barbara G. Rosenkrantz note some of the battling studies in the nineteenth century; as usual there was a concentration on what I call the life preserver phenomenon: studies that focus on drownings will show that there is a much higher percentage of life preservers either nearby or in possession of the deceased.
- Puritans in Taverns: Law and Popular Culture in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1720
- David W. Conroy writes about the political influence of the tavern in local politics.
- Redeeming the Lost: Revivalists and Republicans
- Prohibition forces were also often anti-immigration forces. Germans and Irish might have been open to calls for moderation, but not to calls for full prohibition.
- Return of “The Demon”
- “The final blow came with the Great Depression.”
- The Return of “the Traffic”
- Taxes are apparently a good way to deal with the problems of drug use—as long as we’re willing to collect them.
- The Rise of “the Demon”: Early Distilling
- The lack of good beer turned the colonists more and more to rum, and rum was a gateway drug to whiskey.
- The Role of Alcohol among North American Indian Tribes as Reported in The Jesuit Relations
- R. C. Dailey writes about Jesuit perceptions of Indian alcohol use, but also notes that these writings were for a European audience and were designed to generate funding.
- The Role Of Ethanol Abuse In The Etiology Of Heroin-Related Deaths
- A. J. Ruttenber, H. D. Kalter, and P. Santinga write in the Journal of Forensic Sciences Vol 35, No. 4, July 1990, pp 891-900.
- The Role of the Drunk in a Oaxacan Village
- Philip A. Dennis writes about the drunk as a holy fool; I suspect it’s a theme as old as entertainment.
- Sardines and Other Fried Fish: The Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages on a Micronesian Island
- James D. Nason writes about consumption in Micronesia and covers some of the terminology around alcohol and its use.
- Search for Consensus: Drinking and the War Against Pluralism, 1860-1920
- Home protection was the slogan of the anti-immigration and pro-prohibition forces; on the surface it was about saving homes from the drunken father; but that drunken father was often “a low class of foreigner”.
- Social Drinking in Old Regime Paris
- Thomas Brennan’s paper mentions the growth of acceptance of public drunkenness in Paris. Wine was an important part of socializing as well as a nourishing food.
- The Social Uses of Alcoholic Beverages in a Peruvian Community
- Paul L. Doughty describes the creation and social use of chicha in Peru.
- Socialism, Alcoholism, and the Russian Working Classes before 1917
- George E. Snow, despite mentioning it in the opening paragraphs, has no actual discussion of anti-Semitism as it related to Russian temperance.
- Society and Race Under Threat
- Mankind always seems to need scapegoats to explain their own failures. In the late nineteenth century alcohol became the primary scapegoat, explaining why men committed crimes. In various ways, alcohol has been blamed for the downfall of kingdoms such as the Roman Empire.
- Strong Drink, Strong Drinkers
- High taxes on alcohol first created rebellion; when rebellion ended, the black market began.
- Student Drinking in the Third Reich: Academic Tradition and the Nazi Revolution
- Geoffrey J. Giles notes that some Nazis believed that since people belonged to the state they had no right to damage their bodies.
- The Tavern and Politics in the German Labor Movement, c. 1870-1914
- James S. Roberts notes that the tavern was a “vital social center” for the working class in turn of the century Germany.
- The Think-Drink Effect
- G. Alan Marlatt and Damaris J. Rohsenow, Psychology Today, December 1981, pp. 60-69, 93.
- Use of Alcohol and Opium by the Meo of Laos
- Joseph Westermeyer writes about the wonders of drug use among the Meo; his account seems a little too rose-colored, but I know nothing about Laos personally.
- Virtue in Action
- Prohibition, whether of alcohol or any other desired recreational drug, seems doomed not just to failure but to the same kind of failure: massive violence and an increase in the deleterious effects of the prohibited drug. Within the United States, prohibition resulted in a rise in not just violent crime but in organized criminals.
- The White House, 1933
- The Anti-Saloon League never recovered from getting their desire. The reality of alcohol prohibition showed everything they said to be false; when the last necessary state voted for repeal at 6:32 PM Eastern time, President Roosevelt was ready; he signed the official proclamation at 6:55 PM.
- Wine and Eaux-de-vie
- The popularity of wine led to the evolution of vineyards and to the distillation of alcohol from wine. One use of the distillation process was the creation of “fortified” wines that travelled better. New sources of sugar, such as the West Indies, led to the massive production of rum.
- Women and Temperance in International Perspective: The World’s WTCU, 1880s-1920s
- Ian Tyrrell’s history of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union indicates that they used fear of foreigners—or tried to—to build their organization into an international force.
- The World’s Oldest On-Going Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns
- Nancy Oestreich Lurie compares European use of tobacco with Native American use of alcohol.
- The “Good Creature of God”: Drinking in Early America
- Far away from traditional beer and wine sources, the colonies saw a lot of distilled liquor. Being on the rum route probably didn’t help.
- “Parliaments of the People”: The Political Culture of Cafés in the Early Third Republic
- Susanna Barrows looks at the role of cafés from the “coup de seize mai” to the following elections, when the banished republicans won.
- “Pure Water”: Temperance Becomes Total Abstinence
- As alcohol became more easily available, people drank less on average. It was no longer a draw for employers to offer alcohol on the job. But nobody stopped drinking, and that bothered prohibition advocates, for whome it was the government’s duty to take care of its citizens by infringing the rights of individuals.
- “The Drunken Indian”: Myths and Realities
- Joseph Westermeyer notes that when the focus is on drug use in minority cultures it can be difficult to overcome our own cultural blindnesses, but more importantly that it becomes easy to ignore true problems.
- “Their Best Endeavors”: Enforcing the Volstead Act
- Enforcement costs for alcohol prohibition resemble the pattern we’ve seen recently for prohibition of other drugs: an initial high price followed by astronomical prices.
- “To the Heights of Mount Sinai”
- “You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down!”
- “Wo to Drunkards”: Early Use and Abuse
- Alcoholic beverages were used in political gatherings, social gatherings, and even training gatherings.
More Information
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition•
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Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition as well. If you can find a copy, this is a must-read.
