Prohibition in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclope. Detroit police inspecting equipment found in a clandestine brewery during the Prohibition era Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages that remained in place from 1920 to 1933.[1] The dry movement, led by rural Protestants and social Progressives in the Democratic and Republican parties, was coordinated by the Anti-Saloon League. Prohibition was mandated under the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. US Prohibition was a Failure Cato Inst. National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)—the “noble experiment”—was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America.
The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure. The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.[1] Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased.