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If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?
Well, no, it didn't. The people who were determined to get drunk would have been drunkards with out prohibition as well.
Is that all it was supposed to do, by the way?
No, but that is what it did do.
The people who were pushing for it were the people who had to deal with the results of uncontrolled drunkenness. It wasn't pretty.
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?
Wow all of that? You really think that wasn't there before Prohibition?
Let's look at "lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed" prior to Prohibition you had such delightful items in the booze such as tobacco, rattlesnake heads, wood alcohol and other yummy stuff.
It was aged all of two to three minutes.
Oddly enough the alcohol during Prohibition was probably safer. You didn't want an unhappy customer who could turn you in.
I know it is fashionable to blame everything that went wrong during that time on Prohibition but you have to look at what was happening in the country prior. When you do you find, "loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes, black market trafficking, empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, lots of dangerous thrill drinking" was already there.
If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?
Cynically, it was because the government wanted the money from the booze tax.
But the other part of it was that it did work.
It was no longer needed.
And so it lost support and went away.
That used to happen to laws when they were no longer needed.
Doesn't anymore.