What was Prohibition, and did it work?

The Eighteenth Amendment, implemented through the Volstead Act, banned the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating liquor from January 1920 until repeal in December 1933. It was the culmination of a century of temperance activism drawing on genuine social concerns, since American per-capita alcohol consumption in the 19th century was extraordinarily high and its consequences for families and workplaces were real. The amendment notably did not ban possession or consumption, which is why wealthy households that stocked up beforehand drank legally throughout.

The results are more mixed than either side's mythology. Consumption dropped sharply in the first years, and cirrhosis deaths and alcohol-related arrests declined measurably, so the claim that it accomplished nothing is false. But compliance eroded, enforcement was underfunded and corrupt, and the trade migrated to organized crime, which the era's profits transformed from local operations into national syndicates. Unregulated production killed and blinded people, including through industrial alcohol that the federal government deliberately poisoned to deter diversion. The Great Depression added the decisive argument: legal alcohol meant tax revenue and jobs. Repeal came through the Twenty-first Amendment, the only repeal of a constitutional amendment in American history, and it left regulation to the states, which is why liquor laws still vary so drastically from county to county.