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Comment by abfan1127 | Hacker News Reader

Please see Alcohol Prohibition in the United States (at least back then they amended the US Constitution to do it legally).

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From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success. The main reason it failed as policy is chemistry. You can make ethanol from anything—even a cactus, as Mexico has taught us.

> From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success.

Do you count skyrocketing murder rate and gov't-poisoned hooch in your metric for success?

Sure do. It takes a lot of murder and poison to offset a 20% drop in cirrhosis. Read the paper linked below.

If you're only counting death rates then yeah, the murder is better than the cirrhosis. But the actual experience of living in a society where anyone might be murdered in the street is significantly worse than the experience of living in a society where you can just not drink and not get cirrhosis.

Obviously alcoholics can't just "not drink", but prohibition was never going to be a pleasant experience for them.

Great, and how do you quantify the value of the freedom to live your life the way you want to?

Soa decrease in deaths of cirrhosis is beneficial, presumably as it extends lives. Is the extension of life an inherent benefit? If you lived for 10,000 years in abject misery would that be better than dying in 6 months? Clearly, it's conditional.

Life is complex, every life is unique, so you can safely assume you aren't going to make things better when you try to violently protect people from themselves. If you were arguing about the drop in domestic abuse that'd be one thing, but cirrhosis from alcohol consumption is self-inflicted. Universally falls squarely in the "mind your own business, jack" space.

(citation required, also addressing parent's points would be helpful.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

See also the very entertaining book by Daniel Okrent.

Even according to that article, Prohibition only worked in a public health sense if you considered a reduction in alcohol consumption an absolute public health good in itself. I don't know about you, but drinking 50 gallons a year of legitimate, old school, high-quality pre-prohibition beer and wine doesn't exactly sound worse than drinking 25 gallons a year of moonshine from questionable sources.

It is an absolute good, in that death rates from alcoholism and its diseases are directly related to consumption rates. Cirrhosis, for example, fell by some 20%. But there are also follow-on effects, like the death of saloon culture, a drop in domestic violence, and lower infant mortality.

This stuff is documented, so you don't actually have to deduce it from first principles.

http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Depew.pdf

>> death of saloon culture, a drop in domestic violence, and lower infant mortality

Didn't all those things happen in other countries which didn't implement prohibition? Are you sure it wasn't a natural evolution of society rather than a direct cause-effect from making alcohol harder to get?

From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success.

I don't know about that, didn't lead poisoning go way up?

And methanol poisoning. Not to mention other nasty things that were intentionally added to industrial alcohol to poison anyone who tried to drink it [1] - now, it would be interesting to try and get a sense for how many drunk drivers were kept off the roads during Prohibition, but I doubt most would consider it an unalloyed success, even then.

1: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-pois...

Gotta wonder how much of a negative impact on drunk driving the technology had... I have to imagine it's a lot harder to pull off when everything is a non-synchronized manual transmission.

I was trying to make a joke about bullets, but bad drinks were definitely a problem,too!

There was also "jake leg" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_ginger#History)

But the whole point is that an objective function where you measure success only in terms of infant mortality, number of addicts etc. is absurd.

Prohibition ruins people's lives, when they are sent to jail, marked as felons and excluded from the job market. We spend billions and billions of dollars enforcing these laws. And believe it or not, many people just enjoy drinking, and do it without any negative consequences to themselves or others. You can't ignore all of that and say prohibition is justified just because it (arguably) improves things on a single dimension.

That is a great point. I have no idea how anyone could be so brainwashed as to not agree. How many ruined lives is one less arbitrarily illegal drug user worth?

I think that the kind of people who would agree with prohibition at any cost are followers who won't think for themselves, have no knowledge or interest in history or hopes for a better future, and would have happily extolled the virtues of drug legalization if that had happened to be the policy at the time.

These people seem to attribute no value to civil liberties at all.

so if alcohol weren't so easy to make, like say it had to be imported from the Golden Triangle, it would have never been smuggled (in massive quantities) past the border ?

That would have made it a border control issue, not an "everybody has an uncle that does it" issue.

Today you can do almost anything easily.

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