Actually Prohibition did what it was designed to do. Compare American drinking before and after Prohibition. It dropped drastically and stayed down even after Prohibition was repealed.
Where public drunkenness was common it became uncommon.
You no longer left work and handed your paycheck to the bartender. Yes, that happened literally.
It can be argued that Prohibition resulted in the great upward mobility that happened in the 1950's and onward.
Since drug use has been flat for decades, it must be time to end that prohibition too.
“It can be argued that Prohibition resulted in the great upward mobility that happened in the 50s and onward.”
No it can’t, except maybe by maniacs. In the first place you’d have to ignore the fact that the Great Depression started during prohibition, then you’d have to ignore the fact that there was a bigger gap between the end of prohibition and the postwar boom than between the start of prohibition and the Great Depression. The argument can t be that the generation which grew up under prohibition learner a good lesson about sobriety which showed itself in the 50s, though not the 30s or most if the 40s. But that is nonsense, because that’s a whole generation away.
Is it that prohibition children passed their sober experience onto the next generation? No, because that’s too close to the baby boom generation, which was the most irresponsible to date.
All this ignores, also, the incredible booms of the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th, which was proportionally bigger and historically more important than the postwar boom, plus the Jazz Age boom, which happened during prohibition, yes, but hardly arguable to have been caused by it.
Prohibition may have shrunk consumption generally, but it went up for certain portions of the population. Is that all it was supposed to do, by the way? Was the expenditure worth the result? Were all the negative side effects: loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes concomitant to black market trafficking, funding of empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, increase of dangerous thrill drinking, increase in potency and lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed, etc., unimportant? Seems to me a rather low bar for prohibition’s success to hang on that one measure.
If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?