There are other surprising ways the illegality can wreck more people's lives by changing consumption in ways other than "discouraging".

Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine. If the thing is contraband and you have to sneak it around, better to have lower volume to sneak. But liquor is of course more dangerous in a variety of ways. (On the plus side, we owe the modern cocktail to liquor drinking in prohibition -- because people were drinking more liquor, and it was BAD liquor, you had to cover up the taste. And I do like a cocktail myself).

Similarly, someone getting fentanyl when they wanted to get cocaine is consequence of it being criminalized, and their life is really going to get wrecked, and it was criminalization that did it. Or for that matter the "crack" formulation of cocaine in the first place is a consequence of the criminalized market, it was invented to fit the "business" needs of black market vendors.

Here's a graph I found, it looks like prohibition happened at the end of a huge swing from 90% liquor in 1850 to majority beer in 1915 (with wine always a tiny slice):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-p...

That doesn't have data during prohibition, consumption was obviously not zero, and I'm sure it swung towards hard stuff. But I think there are estimates, maybe 30-40% of pre-prohibition levels (with some lasting effect, but not huge, 1980 above the 1910 peak). I also believe that consumption in say 1700 was considerably higher than 1900.

Maybe it was swinging from liquor to beer, but then prohibition sent it back to liquor?

It looks like estimates are that overall consumption dropped during prohibition (and it was kind of amazingly high before prohibition), but I think what consumption there was, was moved back to liquor? But I can't currently find a cite for that on google, so maybe I was wrong!

It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. But sometimes 'common sense' is not a good guide...

That does track with how cocktails were supposed to have gotten much more popular during prohibition at speakeasies, as the alcohol quality was much lower and they needed to cover the poor taste.

The British would like a word with you...

As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.

"Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional. The moderate use practically produces no ill effects. In all but the most exceptional cases, the injury from habitual moderate use is not appreciable. The excessive use may certainly be accepted as very injurious, though it must be admitted that in many excessive consumers the injury is not clearly marked. The injury done by the excessive use is, however, confined almost exclusively to the consumer himself; the effect on society is rarely appreciable. It has been the most striking feature in this inquiry to find how little the effects of hemp drugs have obtruded themselves on observation. The large number of witnesses of all classes who professed never to have seen these effects, the vague statements made by many who professed to have observed them, the very few witnesses who could so recall a case as to give any definite account of it, and the manner in which a large proportion of these cases broke down on the first attempt to examine them, are facts which combine to show most clearly how little injury society has hitherto sustained from hemp drugs."

Alcohol use is around 65% with a substantial fraction drinking higher quantities regularly. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-i...

If you are referring to the Muslim world, countries like Mauritania or Saudi Arabia with draconian alcohol prohibition nevertheless see a lot of men excessively drinking in private. Alcohol is available clandestinely, though the prohibition on openly importing or distilling it means that sometimes drinkers have to resort to homemade liquor. The sad thing is that the total prohibition on alcohol makes it hard for alcoholics to seek treatment, lest they be subject to criminal punishment.

Prohibition was enacted via constitutional amendment, a process which requires supermajorities. The 18th Amendment was ratified via state legislatures rather than constitutional convention, but most states had already instituted prohibition by popular mandate.

The real issue AFAIU is that as originally understood the language of the 18th Amendment would only permit national prohibition of hard alcohol--"intoxicating liquors"--much like most existing state laws. But the enabling legislation ended up prohibiting wine and beer and the Supreme Court upheld that interpretation. Ironically, the court took a much stricter stance on what "manufacture" meant, protecting even distillation for private use, but that allowance hardly mitigated the effect of their earlier interpretation of "intoxicating liquors".

TL;DR: most Americans at least nominally supported prohibition of liquor, but not beer and wine. Alcoholism had been a major public health and social issue for generations, far greater than today, but it mostly regarded the obscene quantities of hard liquor Americans consumed. What they got was something much more strict than they bargained for.

So it was more of big fight of two parts of public.

Cocaine and marijuana are widely used. Whether they're okay depends a lot on your circles, but generally marijuana use is tracking towards "deemed okay" as well.

> As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.

They also have a lot less people :)

Afghanistan + Djibouti + Iran + Kuwait + Libya + Mauritania + Saudi Arabia + Somalia + Yemen = ~200 million people.

Add to that the number of Muslims living in countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan without total prohibition but with prohibition for Muslims, and you’ll easily exceed the population of the US.

My point is simply that managing the enforcement of a law like prohibition is very different between 800m and 8m people.

What alcohol does have is widespread social understanding, it's deep in our culture. Your grandmother had a pretty decent idea of how this could go wrong, and of what non-dangerous use looks like. So does your priest. And your mother in law. And Shakespeare. Not a perfect defence mechanism, obviously, but not nothing.

Whereas for cocaine, almost nobody has a clue.

Of course, now it seems I'm arguing for prohibition after all, maybe that's because alcohol is legal, is that why more people get into trouble with it?

My sense is that criminalization doesn't have much role in it though. I think cultural factors, as you mention, are more powerful.

And the number of people whose lives are wrecked by the criminal justice system because of drug prohibition is really significant.

Maybe that's too strong, I'm not really sure how much more dangerous cocaine is. But even if it were somehow comparable, maybe we should be scared by what the arrival of alcohol did to peoples who hadn't had much of it -- this was true of many native american groups, IIRC. And many others worldwide.

Are there ways to make cocaine use safer? Yes, of course! Legalisation will help greatly (you'll know exactly what you are getting and we can standardize strength like we've done with alcohol). We can also educate folks in a variety of ways. Offer free help to folks that do find themselves addicted. I'm going to guess folks wrote about it more indepth before it became illegal as well.

Apologies if I’ve misunderstood the intent of these comments, but —- what is the argument that connects “alcohol is more destructive” to “cannabis (and perhaps other drugs) should be legalised everywhere”? To me, without some connecting argument it seems to be a non-sequitur.

Illegal alcohol is more harmful.

We need to stop treating substance misuse as a criminal justice matter and start treating it as a public health problem.

Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR.

There's nothing preventing us from treating substance abuse as both and indeed it's likely more effective.

"Legalise drugs" does not mean provide them for free to anyone who asks with no controls at all on their supply or use.

smoking hasn't been controlled through "tight regulation", it's been controlled through the public health measure of price increase.

No, it really is not.

The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. If this surprises you, see https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition for confirmation.

And history repeats itself. Racism was also one of the main things fueling the drug war. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st... for more on that.

The temperance movement was global in scale and existed independently of racist and nativist political factions. That’s not to say that those groups didn’t overlap at times, but the reality was much more complicated than you present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement for more background.

Also, for long time, it was accepted to drink in work, leading to injuries with serious consequences.

Contemporary society is much better regarding all those, so we kind of forget how ugly things often were.

I'm just surprised how seldom this connection gets mentioned. It seems that, having repealed prohibition and decided that it didn't work, we to place it in the "bad things" column, and are very happy to tie it to other bad things (like the mafia). While suffrage of course lives in the "good things" column. But forcing things into black & white doesn't help us see clearly, and the reality of temperance / prohibition was much more complicated.