> it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).

Opium was prohibited even after the opium wars. That's not a good example of non-prohibition but instead the knockon effects of worst of both worlds informal, capricious quasi-legality.

> The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.

I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth, and the most negative effects of prohibition (extremely violent organized crime) still seem to be present.

> That's not a good example of non-prohibition

Yep, which is why I used the term "more lenient policies," not necessarily non-prohibition. Opium dens were getting more and more problematic in San Francisco[1] until they were criminalized in the late 19th century.

> I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth

I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.

[1] https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinatown%27s_Opium_...

> Yep, which is why I used the term "more lenient policies," not necessarily non-prohibition. Opium dens were getting more and more problematic in San Francisco[1] until they were criminalized in the late 19th century.

The point is that prohibition the issue. Being more lenient while still keeping prohibition isn't a half way point, but still keeps the most harmful elements intact.

> I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.

Do you think that prohibition is effectively preventing large scale societal disruption?

Prohibition wasn't an abject failure. The most pessimistic reading is that its results were mixed, with many scholars believing it was a success. (There was a reason it took 14 years to repeal and not because people thought it was an abject failure.)

Copied & pasted from Wikipedia:

"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[7]

Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4] Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition.[7] The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter 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."[8] In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it".[8] During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%.[9] In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."[6]

> 14 years to repeal

It took that long to repeal because it was an amendment (and thus needed another amendment to repeal it). The rest of your post basically says people drank less therefore less people drank (it's obvious that if less people drink, less people will have alcohol problems). I'm not sure if the academic consensus is that it was "mixed," most top search results seem to agree that it was kind of a failure[1][2], but to be fair I never studied it in depth and Google can be biased.

[1] https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/alcohol-prohibition-was...

[2] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...

If the goal was to have to people drink less.... And then they drank less... How is that an abject failure?

I'm not really clear what you're trying to argue here. Could you be more explicit?

> I'm not really clear what you're trying to argue here.

Prohibition fell out of popularity, so to me it seems like it was a failure because it didn't significantly impact domestic policy in the long-term. As opposed to something like women's suffrage.

What on earth makes you think violent crimes are being decriminalised, or that anyone is advocating that?