Prohibition was a really shit idea!

Inside a busy 1920s speakeasy

Most of us can admit that we’re not perfect. That we’ll sometimes come up with some bad ideas that go horribly wrong; that time I tried to drunkenly wee off the side of a cliff, for example. Luckily, it wasn’t a very big cliff, and the ambulance arrived quickly.

Occasionally, some genius dreams up a solution to a problem that goes so spectacularly badly, that it ends up making things much worse.

Like when the Australian government introduced Cane Toads to stop beetles eating the Queensland sugar cane crop, only to unleash a biblical-level plague of unstoppable, poisonous bastards that have eaten several native species to extinction. Even when cane toads become food themselves, these arseholes so toxic, anything that eats them will certainly die.

Which brings me to Prohibition. The American one, when between 1920 and 1933, the government banned the production, sale, and drinking of alcohol. The road to prohibition started many years before, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Back then, The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League fought to improve the lives of women and children by addressing the poverty, squalid conditions, and violence they believed was caused by the "demon alcohol".

They prayed and they marched, and they marched and prayed, and when that didn’t work, they fought dirty. One of their leaders, Carrie Nation, “Hatchet Granny” as she was known, became a household name after she smashed the shite out of several saloon bars with a tomahawk. As they got more powerful, the WCTU campaigned for the complete prohibition of alcohol.

And they won.

Carrie Nation, also known as “Hatchet Granny”

On the 17th of January, 1920, prohibition became law, and the shenanigans started. US President Herbert Hoover wrote that “Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose."

In reality, the great and noble experiment was a total shit-show.

The problem with the plan was simple; it was complete bollox! Prohibition was meant to address the havoc that booze was wrecking across America, but instead it was a licence for moral crusaders to wage war on anyone they saw as a threat to the fabric of white, protestant America.

Immigrants were particular targets for these anti-booze Zealots. The Irish, Germans, and Italians ranked way up at the top of their hitlist, although Catholics, African Americans, Mexicans, the poor, and people that lived in big cities were also seen as weak and corrupt sinners, and fair game!

Immigrant communities, who mostly lived in cities, and whose use of whiskey, beer, and wine were at the very heart their cultures, were considered little better than drunken savages.

Prohibition was supported by the “Drys” in many rural communities, but it was hated and widely ignored by the “Wets” in the cities. At the height of prohibition there were over 30,000 illegal bars, known as “Hooch Joints”, “Gin Joints”, or “Speakeasies”, in New York City.

So many people went to Speakeasies, they were considered the “worst kept secret in America.” There were big clubs, small clubs, back room bars.

Clubs called "black and tan" clubs where blacks and whites drank together, although these clubs were the exception rather than the rule.

Even the most famous club at the time, The Cotton Club, kept black performers and the white audience apart. Owney Madden, (whose nickname was "The Killer), the Irish American boss at the Cotton Club, made a fortune from illegal alcohol, and unusually for a gangster of the era, lived to spend it in his retirement.

But he wasn’t the only one to get rich selling “hooch”. Prohibition was a great time to be a gangster. Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello were just some of the gangsters that built empires from bootleg alcohol.

It was a service that people wanted. Capone once said, "All I do is supply a public demand... somebody had to throw some liquor on that thirst." To some, Capone was a hero, he was free with money, set up soup kitchens for the unemployed, and swaggered about in a big white hat, like a fucking 1920s Kardashian.

Of course, when he wasn't engaged in these acts of civic duty, he was murdering anyone who crossed him, with extreme brutality. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was down to Capone.

Some of the organized crime bosses that made a fortune from bootleg booze

To be fair, there were some unintentional upsides to Prohibition. So many illegal bars and clubs sprung up, that prohibition helped create the Roaring '20s.

Women got more freedom, leading to what has been called, “the first sexual revolution”, jazz transformed America and how black Americans were seen, at least in the underground club scene.

To hide the shitty taste of poorly made bootleg booze, cocktails, and cocktail parties became a thing. Drinks like the "Bees Knees", an absolute classic made from gin, honey, and lemon. Or the "Last Word": gin with Chartreuse and maraschino cherry liqueur, which was born at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1922.

Literature, and the arts boomed. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, sells 500.000 copies every year to this day, nearly 100 years later.

But as a means to curb alcohol use, Prohibition was a complete failure, which caused more problems than it hoped to fix. It made criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Poorly made bootleg booze poisoned, blinded, and killed countless people.

Job losses in the alcohol industry caused mass hardship and meant less tax revenue to tackle it. The government's inability to collect taxes on alcohol made the problems of the Great Depression even worse than they would have been otherwise.

Prohibition bred widespread corruption among law enforcement officials and politicians who were bribed or stood over by bootleggers. Organised crime and the violence that came with it flourished, and the death count was staggering.

This absolute shambles of a policy was repealed in 1933, although some states continued to ban alcohol for many years afterwards.

There’s an American saying, “There is no learning in the second kick from a mule.” We make the same mistakes, and we get the same outcomes, play the same stupid games, and win the same stupid prizes.

Today, drug prohibition and the War on Drugs, make all the same mistakes. In this new war, the battle lines are still drawn on race, income, and perceived morality. It’s a war on people, and there are many casualties.

Some solutions are just worse than the problems they mean to fix.