Arguments Against Prohibitionism

Prohibitionists were so convinced that banning alcohol would automatically change the behavior of Americans and little thought actually was put in the enforcement of the newly endorsed Eighteenth Amendment. The Volstead Act was formed to back up the newly established Eighteenth Amendment when the Prohibition Bureau was founded. Congress only set aside two million dollars for the new Prohibition Bureau. The Prohibition Bureau was the federal law enforcement agency that enforced the new Prohibition laws. To many prohibitionists surprise, the sober American was short lived, while the law changed the demand for alcohol had not. Drinking moved from restaurants and bars to the home, stores started carry supplies for people to distill their own liquor and brew their own beer. Bootlegging is the illegal production or distribution of liquor. People made their own “liquor stills” and eventually started “bootlegging”; they supplied illegal alcohol to anyone who had the money to pay for it. By the 1930’s these activities had become one of the largest illegitimate industries in America. The earliest bootleggers began smuggling foreign-made commercial liquor into the United States from across the Canadian and Mexican borders and along the seacoasts from ships under foreign registry. Bootleggers preferred source of supply were the Bahamas, Cuba, and the French islands off the southern coast of Newfoundland. A
The Eighteenth Amendment had been in operation for an hour when the police recorded the first attempt to break it, with six armed men stealing some $100,000-worth of "medicinal" whisky from a train in Chicago. From the very beginning, criminals had recognized that Prohibition represented a marvelous business opportunity; in major cities, indeed, gangs had quietly been stockpiling booze supplies for weeks. The most notorious American organized crime that many people know today was the American