Friday, 17 January 2020

Prohibition - never again?

Today marks one hundred years since the start of Prohibition. I've written an article for Spiked about its legacy and the lessons that have and have not been learned.

The problem with arguing about whether prohibition ‘worked’ is that it implicitly acknowledges a false premise. It suggests that the policy would have been commendable had the government been able to enforce it properly. But as Daniel Okrent, author of the excellent Last Call, writes, the worst thing about prohibition was that ‘it took away an individual right’. All the problems we associate with prohibition stemmed from people responding to their right to drink being violated, but we should not imagine that prohibition would have been a ‘success’ if the public had meekly submitted.

In retrospect, it is obvious that there were far too many drinkers in 1920 for national prohibition to have ‘worked’ in the sense of being respected. But even if the US had avoided all the murders and poisonings, there would have been nothing noble about the experiment. It was a hideously illiberal policy with strong undertones of xenophobia and class prejudice, and would have been no less objectionable if drinkers had been an obscure minority. Prohibition was dreadful both in practice and in principle.

A recent study, which found some positive health effects from earlier statewide prohibitions, finished by saying: ‘Whether or not these benefits exceeded the costs of prohibition remains an open question.’ Why? Because ‘importantly, if individuals are utility maximising, value-of-life measures lose meaning since they do not incorporate the lost utility from forgone alcohol consumption’. The authors are economists, and it shows, but their point is that people enjoy drinking. Assuming they know the risks, drinkers take more out of alcohol than alcohol takes out of them (to paraphrase Churchill). If you deprive them of this pleasure, or make it pricier or more difficult to acquire, you are doing them real harm. This is a crucial aspect of public-health policy that is rarely mentioned in the public-health literature.

Do read it all.

I've also created a Twitter thread of prohibitionist propaganda.

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