Pros And Cons Of The Prohibition Movement

The prohibition movement shows that no matter what restrictions are put into place, if people want to do something, they will find a way to do it. Alcohol may have been banned nationwide, but that didn’t stop people from enjoying themselves and doing what they wanted to do. This same exact thing happens today as well.
The prohibition movement began with the idea of temperance, which was a sort of perfectionist movement. People thought of alcohol as something unfit for a pure society, and beginning with Massachusetts in 1838, states began passing laws to ban the production and sale of alcohol. Although Massachusetts quickly reverted the law after extreme unhappiness, other states attempted the same thing throughout the 1800s. The movement started
Crime would decrease, people would be safer, productivity would increase, everyone would be more healthy, the pros seemed as though they went on and on. The problem was that not everyone was okay with these changes. People still wanted to go out and drink, and this new amendment wasn’t enforced well enough to stop them from doing so. Places known as “Speakeasies” began to pop up which secretly and illegally produced and sold alcoholic beverages. There were plenty of loopholes in the law that even made it possible to produce and sell alcohol legally. While over the course of the decade, plenty of them were caught and shut down, there were still so many left standing that anyone who really wanted to go out and have a drink could do so. In summary, people thought that prohibition would boost the nation significantly, but while the amendment made it much more of a hassle to have an alcoholic beverage, it was still far from impossible to get your hands on one, and the law wasn’t cheap to
For example, while crime was expected to decrease, due to so many people illegally buying and selling alcohol, crime increased greatly and gangs began to rise in big cities. Al Capone is the most notorious of them all, having made over $60 million every year from his bootlegging operations. This organized crime, along with numerous people who bought, sold, and produced alcohol illegally caused prisons to fill with people who had committed minor infractions. People also believed that everyone would become more healthy since they wouldn’t be drinking anymore, but people were still drinking all the time. Alcohol that was being illegally produced was actually much less safe. Drinks often had a higher alcohol level than drinks in the past from before the prohibition time. Thousands died every year in the 1920s due to poorly made alcohol. When the alcohol industry was stripped away in 1920, thousands of jobs were lost. The economy took a big hit due to so many businesses being destroyed, which caused the government to lose billions of dollars. Basically, everything that prohibition was supposed to solve ended up getting worse. Due to these numerous downsides to the amendment, people realized fairly quickly that it did far more harm than good, and needed to be repealed before more damage was inevitably