Was Prohibition a Mistake? 
After Prohibition laws were discarded,  many people believed (and still believe today)  that Prohibition was a major mistake. Yet some historians argue with this view.

Says Catherine Gilbert Murdock,  “According to popular opinion,  the attempt by small-minded moralists to eliminate a drug so easily manufactured,  so readily transported,  and so essential to the national psyche was doomed from the beginning. Yet alcohol abuse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries existed on a scale Americans today have trouble conceptualizing. Public drunkards were a pathetic, everyday spectacle in villages and cities throughout America.  Drink really did kill men and ruin families, and millions of citizens felt that the best way to meet the crisis would be to eliminate alcoholic beverages.  Moreover,  the nation’s abusive drinking patterns were strictly gendered.  At the very most,  20 percent of the alcoholic population was female. Historically, it is not America that has had a drinking problem, it is American men.”

Other experts have stated that death rates from acute and chronic alcoholism dropped subsequent to the passage of Prohibition. For example, according to Haven Emerson, M.D., in his article in 1932 for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, death rates for white males per 100,000 individuals fell from 7.9 in 1911 to 5.2 in 1924. In addition, death rates from cirrhosis of the liver fell from 16.8 per 100,000 in 1911 among white males to 7.7 in 1924. Haven also noted that admissions to state hospitals for alcoholic psychosis in New York dropped from 11.5 percent in 1910 to 3.0 percent in 1920, rising to 6.5 percent in 1931.

In Massachusetts, the rate dropped by more than half, from 14.6 percent in 1910 to 6.4 percent in 1922, then increasing to 7.7 percent in 1929.

Emerson concluded,  “While we do not know the per capita consumption of alcohol in this country since prohibition,  the lowering of death rates and sick rates from causes related to alcoholism offers strong presumptive evidence that prohibition has accomplished a reduction in the beverage
use of alcohol in the United States.”

According to author Jack S. Blocker, in his 2006 article for the American Journal of Public Health, Prohibition had a major positive effect on many people.  Said Blocker,  “Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the later years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect.  They rose after that,  but generally did not reach the peaks recorded during the period 1900 to 1915.” According to Blocker, even after the repeal of Prohibition, per capita annual consumption levels were less than half that of the pre-Prohibition period. Consumption did not reach the pre-Prohibition peak of alcohol use again until the 1970s.

Blocker concluded,  “Perhaps the most powerful legacy of National Prohibition is the widely held belief that it did not work. I agree with other historians who have argued that this belief is false.

Prohibition did work in lowering per capita consumption. The lowered level of consumption during the quarter century following Repeal, together with the large minority of abstainers, suggests that Prohibition did socialize or maintain a significant portion of the population in temperate or abstemious habits.”