By the by, because it's really interesting, prohibition wasn't intended / wasn't understood to apply to beer and wine by the vast majority of supporters of the amendment. Some people leveraged white nationalism / anti-german racism, including the fact that many brewers were German, to pass the Volstead act which banned all alcohol. And by all alcohol I mean nothing like all alcohol -- there were many widely used loopholes, including getting a prescription from your doctor, buying grape juice with a warning to drink it within X days or it would ferment and become alcoholic, or even becoming jewish (10 gallons per person per year!). It really was a ban on some persons some of the time.

If you're interested, read Daniel Okrent _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition_

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/07...

Good thing the American public learned our lesson and never did anything stupid like that again.

Last Call: The rise and Fall of prohibition is a very interesting read on the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition-ebook/...

>The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations.

Actually, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition virtually all of the organizations devoted to booze either went legit or drastically shrank in size and scope. We would've been better off without alcohol prohibition in the first place, but ending it was certainly a net win.

If you're interested in the history and parallels of alcohol prohibition to today's drug prohibition, Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074... .

The author of that wrote http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074... which I heard an interesting interview about on NPR.

From that interview I learned that there is a lot about the politics of the day that I didn't know. For instance did you know that the KKK supported the Suffrage movement (giving women the vote) because they believed women would vote for Prohibition, which could be used to target Catholic immigrant groups? (Immigrants were a major target of the KKK at that time.)

I haven't gotten around to getting that book yet, but it is on my list of books to read.