Prohibition was any of several periods during which the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages were restricted or illegal.

In the United States, Prohibition was accomplished by means of the Eighteenth Amendment to the national Constitution (ratified January 16, 1919) and the Volstead Act (passed October 28, 1919).

National Prohibition became a reality on January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect and
Federal Prohibition agents (police) were given the task of enforcing the law.

Prohibition also referred to that part of the Temperance movement that wanted to make alcohol illegal.

These groups brought about much change even prior to national prohibition.

By 1905, three American states had already outlawed alcohol; by 1912, it was up to nine states; and, by 1916, legal prohibition was already in effect in 26 of the 48 states.

Even though the sale of alcohol was illegal, alcoholic drinks were still widely available at "speakeasies" and other underground drinking establishments.

Speakeasies gained their name from the fact that a patron had to "speak easy" and convince the doorman to let them in.

His job was to keep out those who looked like they were "dry" agents.

Many people don't know this, but these agents had no forced-entry rights at all, and so could not break into an establishment if the doorman refused them entry.

Many people also kept private bars to serve their guests.

Large quantities of booze was smuggled in from Canada, overland and via the Great Lakes, and from the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. Additional alcohol was delivered from "Rum Row" off the US East Coast.

Legal and illegal home brewing was very popular during Prohibition.

Limited amounts of wine and hard cider were permitted to be made at home.

Some commercial wine was still produced in the U.S., but was only available through government warehouses for use in religious ceremonies, particularly for communion in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Episcopal churches and in some Jewish ceremonies. "Malt and hop" stores popped up across the country and some former breweries turned to selling malt extract syrup, ostensibly for baking and "beverage" purposes.

 
Prohibition  "Medicinal Alcohol" prescription form.

Whiskey was available by prescription from medical doctors.

The labels warned that it was strictly for medicinal purposes and any other uses were illegal.

But even so doctors freely wrote these prescriptions and druggists filled them without question, and the number of "patients" increased dramatically.

Authorities never really tried to restrict this practice, which was the way many people got their daily dose:

Over a million gallons were consumed per year through these freely given prescriptions.

Because Prohibition banned only the manufacture, sale, and transport--but not possession or consumption--of alcohol, some people and institutions who had bought or made liquor prior to the passage of the 18th Amendment were able to continue to serve it throughout the prohibition period legally.

Even some prominent citizens and politicians later admitted to having used alcohol during Prohibition.

President Harding always kept the White House bar well stocked with bootleg liquor, though, as a Senator... he had voted for Prohibition!

This discrepancy between legality and actual practice led to widespread disdain for authority in America.

Some Prohibition law men took bribes to overlook the illegal brewing activities of gangsters and many problems arose.

It had been estimated that six million dollars would be needed to enforce prohibition laws.

Over time, however, more people drank illegally and money ended up in mob pockets.

Mobsters would then bribe officials to ignore their illegal activities and the cost of enforcing prohibition laws thus increased.

In some cases, the money likely ended up in corrupt Prohibition agencies.

Prohibition also presented lucrative opportunities for organized crime to take over the importation ("bootlegging"), manufacture, and distribution of alcoholic beverages.

Al Capone, one of the most infamous bootleggers of them all, built his criminal empire largely on profits from illegal alcohol.

With alcohol production largely in the hands of criminals and unregulated clandestine home manufacturers, the quality of the product varied widely.

There were many cases of people going blind or suffering from brain damage after drinking "bathtub gin" made with industrial alcohol or various poisonous chemicals.

In one notorious incident involved the patent medicine Jamaica ginger, known by its users as "Jake."

It had a very high alcohol content and was known to be consumed by those desiring to circumvent the ban on alcohol.

The Treasury Department mandated changes in the formulation to make it undrinkable.

Unscrupulous vendors then adulterated their Jake with an industrial plasticizer in an attempt to fool government testing.

As a result, tens of thousands of victims suffered paralysis of their feet and hands—usually, this paralysis was permanent.

In other cases some amateur distillers used old automobile radiators to distill liquor, and the subsequent product was dangerously high in lead salts--which usually led to fatal lead poisoning.

Amateur distillation of liquor could be dangerous to the producer as well, since poorly built stills sometimes exploded in flames

Drug stores that were caught violating prohibition were forced into closure.

There were also many alcoholic products that fell just under the legal limit, and yet, with a bit of work, could become the real thing.

One particular beverage was called "near beer," because it fell under the 0.5-percent ban, being virtually nonalcoholic.

It gave detailed, step-by-step instructions on what the buyer should not (under any circumstances) do with it, for then he or she would have alcohol, and that was illegal. Consumers could simply use the easy-to-follow instructions to make an alcoholic beer.

Mockery of prohibition laws took many forms.

There were, however, exceptions to this public scorn, such as the activities such as the famous New York City prohibition agent team of Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, known together as simply Izzy and Moe.

Izzy & Moe

Moe Smith played the Dr. Watson to Izzy Einstein’s Sherlock Holmes, and they were probably the only two prohibition agents whom the public liked. They operated in the first years of Prohibition, 1920 to 1925, when it was comparatively hard to get a drink; the years when bartenders peered out through peepholes and new customers had to go through the formalities of presenting admission cards or saying "Joe sent me."
 
Moe, although somewhat in the role of straight man, was a highly effective agent, but Izzy (the human chameleon), with his numberless disguises, was the color and front man. He was, in turn, a traveling salesman, a street cleaner, a banker, a bartender, a grave digger, a streetcar conductor, a Texas cattleman and, in Hollywood, a movie extra. You name it, he played the part.
 
The pair closed innumerable speakeasies in every imaginable way. A speakeasy around Van Cortland Park was padlocked after Izzy arrived in a mud-covered football uniform and announced that the gridiron season was over and he was ready to break training.

In Coney Island, he entered a drinking joint in a wet bathing suit, shivering and gasping for aid. Wearing an attendant’s white jacket, he shut another saloon near a hospital.
 
Izzy once tossed his agent’s badge on the bar of a Bowery saloon and — this fat, unkempt individual — asked for a pint of whisky for "a deserving prohibition agent." The bartender sold it to him, thinking him a great wit.

Izzy and Moe, rotund and cheerful men, made life so miserable for the prohibition-law violaters, that waiters, bartenders and speakeasy proprietors feared to sell liquor to anyone if a "rumor" circulated that "they" were in the area.
 
On one of their busiest nights, the twosome raided 48 saloons. In their career they made 4,392 arrests, of which 95% ended in convictions!

Eliot Ness and his elite team of Treasury Agents nicknamed The Untouchables were another exception...

In 1926, his sister's husband, Alexander Jamie, a Bureau of Investigation agent (this became the FBI in 1935), influenced him to enter law enforcement. He joined the Treasury Department in 1927, working with the 300-strong Bureau of Prohibition in Chicago.

Following the election of President Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon was specifically charged with bringing down Alphonse Capone. The federal government approached the problem from two directions: income tax evasion and the Volstead Act. Ness was chosen to head the operations under the Volstead Act, targeting the illegal breweries and supply routes of Capone.

With corruption among law-enforcement agents endemic, Ness went through the records of all the treasury agents to create a reliable team, initially of fifty, later reduced to fifteen and finally to just eleven men. Raids against stills and breweries began immediately; within six months Ness claimed to have seized breweries worth over one million dollars. The main source of information for the raids was an extensive wire-tapping operation.

An attempt by Capone to bribe Ness's agents was seized on by Ness for publicity, leading to the media nickname "The Untouchables". There were a number of assassination attempts on Ness, and one close friend of his was killed.

The efforts of Ness and his team had a serious impact on Capone's operations, but it was the income tax evasion which was the key weapon. In a number of federal grand jury cases in 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of tax evasion and also 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. On October 17, 1931, Capone was sentenced to eleven years, and following a failed appeal, he began his sentence in 1932.

After Capone's conviction

Ness was promoted to Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau for Chicago and in 1934 for Ohio. Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, he took a job with the local government of Cleveland as Director of Public Safety. He headed up a campaign to clean out the corrupt police and fire departments, and also tackle illegal gambling and other entertainments. Ness's inability to capture the Cleveland Torso Murderer, a vicious serial killer operating in the Cleveland area during the mid-1930s, may have also contributed to his exit from what was otherwise a reasonably successful career in Cleveland.

Ness then moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the federal government. In 1944, he left to become chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company based in Ohio. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in 1947 and was forced from his job at Diebold in April 1951.(NY Times April 14, 1951 "Executive Changes"). He eventually came to work for North Ridge Industrial in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. His book, The Untouchables, was published in 1957 shortly after his death at the age of 54 following a heart attack. In one popular yet false anecdote, he died just as he was about to have the first alcoholic drink of his life.

He was married three times, divorced twice, and had only one child (by adoption). He was married to illustrator Evaline Ness from 1938 to 1946. His ashes were scattered in one of the small ponds on the grounds of Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland.

For these exceptions, Ness' honesty and flair for public relations and Izzy and Moe's more eccentric, but highly effective, methods with disguises attracted considerable media attention and allowed for much public entertainment.

THE END OF PROHIBITION

The Volstead Act was amended to allow "3.2 beer" (3.2 percent alcohol by volume) by passage of the Blaine Act on February 17, 1933.

The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed later in 1933 with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5.

The Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed nationwide prohibition, explicitly gives states the right to restrict or ban the purchase and sale of alcohol; this has led to a patchwork of laws, in which alcohol may be legally sold in some but not all towns or counties within a particular state.

After the repeal of the national constitutional amendment, some states continued to enforce prohibition laws; Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mississippi were still "dry" in 1948.

Mississippi, which had made alcohol illegal in 1907, was the last state to repeal prohibition, in 1966.

While there are still some dry counties and communities in the United States (mainly in the South), in practice this now means little more than that people wishing to buy alcohol must travel some distance to do so and bars are not allowed in the prohibiting jurisdiction.

SOME PROBLEMS WITH PROHIBITION

Many social problems have been attributed to the Prohibition era;

• A profitable, often violent, black market for alcohol flourished
• Racketeering happened when powerful gangs corrupted law enforcement agencies.
• Stronger liquor surged in popularity because its potency made it more profitable to smuggle.
• The cost of enforcing prohibition was high, and the lack of tax revenues on alcohol (some $500 million annually nationwide) affected government coffers.
• When repeal of prohibition occurred in 1933, following passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, organized crime lost nearly all of its black market alcohol profits, due to competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores. Organized crime later adjusted by selling illegal drugs instead.
• Prohibition had a notable effect on the brewing industry in the United States. When Prohibition ended, only half the breweries that had previously existed reopened. Many small breweries were out of business for good!Because mainly the largest breweries had survived, American beer came to be chided as a characterless, mass-produced commodity. Beer connoisseurs lamented the decreased quality and variety. It was only in the 1980s that craft brewing finally recovered. Fritz Maytag has been credited with jumpstarting the microbrew revolution that awoke brewing from its post-Prohibition doldrums.

PROHIBITION TRIVIA

* During Prohibition, temperance activists hired a scholar to rewrite the Christian Bible by removing all references to alcohol beverage (Prohibition).
* The Ku Klux Klan strongly supported Prohibition and its strict enforcement (Moore).
When the ship Washington was launched, a bottle of water, rather than traditional champagne or wine, was ceremonially broken across her bow (Behr).
* In the 1890s, Carrie Nation from the WCTU fought for prohibition by walking into saloons, scolding customers, and using her hatchet to destroy bottles of liquor. Other activists enforced the cause by entering saloons, singing, praying, and urging saloonkeepers to stop selling alcohol.
* The first beer sold in the United States after Prohibition was Utica Club of the F.X. Matt's Brewery in Utica, NY.
* The last vote needed to obtain a 2/3rds majority in order to repeal prohibition was provided by Utah, despite the efforts of Heber J. Grant and the Mormon Church.

PROHIBITION AROUND THE GLOBE

Australia

The first consignment of liquor for Canberra, following the repeal of prohibition laws in 1928.
Alcohol is prohibited in many remote indigenous communities across Australia. Penalties for transporting alcohol into these "dry" communities are severe and can result in confiscation of any vehicles involved.

In dry areas within the Northern Territory, all vehicles used to transport alcohol are seized and there is no right of appeal.

There have been various places proclaimed alcohol free in the past, including Australia's capital city, Canberra, which was dry from 1910 to 1928.

The politician King O'Malley ran legislation through Federal Parliament in Melbourne at the time the capital territory was established.

When Federal Parliament moved from Melbourne to Canberra in 1927, one of the first pieces of legislation passed in the new Parliament House was the repeal of O'Malley's prohibition laws.

A number of Melbourne's suburbs had a long running prohibition on the sale (though not consumption) of alcohol.

One or two still exist.

Ascot Vale was founded as a dry suburb, but hotels were soon built at the outside corners of the settlement.

Similarly, the irrigation settlement of Mildura was also founded with a prohibition on the sale of alcohol in 1887.

This was inaugurated by its founders, the Chaffey brothers.

However, the brothers also operated a winery, even producing fortified wine.

Alcohol was readily available from nearby Wentworth however, and the ban was eventually lifted.

Britain

Prohibition was never enacted in Britain, but it was promoted by Liberals such as David Lloyd George, especially those with a political base in Methodist areas such as Wales.

In World War I Britain restricted the amount of alcohol available, taxed it, and drastically reduced the hours of opening for pubs.

After the war restrictions on quantity were dropped but taxes were raised and pub hours restricted.

The pub remained a British institution but sobriety increased.

Licensed pubs in England and Wales numbered 88,739 in 1913, 82,054 in 1922, and 77,821 in 1930.

Consumption of beer fell from 35 million barrels in 1913 to 13 million in 1918, recovered to 27 million in 1920, and settled at about 20 million barrels after 1927.

Whiskey and other spirits declined dramatically from 31.7 million proof gallons in 1913 to 22 million in 1920 and 10 million in 1930.

Convictions for drunkenness declined sharply as well: in 1913 the number was 153,112 men and 35,765 women; in 1922 63,253 men and 13,094 women; in 1930 44,683 men and 8,397 women. [Statistical Abstract of U.K., 1930 pp. 88-9, 354. cited in Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (1955) p 250.]

Canada

An official but non-binding federal referendum was held in 1898 on prohibition, receiving 51.3% for to 48.7% against prohibition on a voter turnout of 44%.

Prohibition had a majority in all provinces except for Quebec, where a strong 81.10% voted against.

Despite the majority, Wilfrid Laurier's government chose not to introduce a federal bill on prohibition, perhaps mindful of the strong antipathy in Quebec.

As a result, Canadian prohibition was instead enacted through laws passed by the provinces during the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Prince Edward Island was the first to bring in prohibition in 1900.

Alberta passed a prohibition law in 1916. Quebec passed legislation in 1918 that would prohibit alcohol in 1919 for the duration of World War I. However, since the war ended in 1918, prohibition was never implemented in the province.

The provinces then repealed their prohibition laws, mostly during the 1920s.

Quebec was first to repeal in 1920, giving it the shortest amount of time with prohibition enforced; Prince Edward Island was last in 1948. Alberta repealed in 1924, along with Saskatchewan, upon realizing that the laws were unenforceable.

Realizing that they could not stop people from drinking entirely, temperance advocates successfully pressured all provincial and territorial governments to curtail the sale of liquor as much as possible through the tight control of liquor control boards.

The Scandinavian Countries

Scandinavia, with the exception of Denmark, has had a long temperance tradition.

Prohibition was enforced in Iceland from 1915 to 1922 (with beer prohibited until 1989), in Norway from 1916 to 1927 and in Finland between 1919 and 1932.

Alcohol was still prohibited in The Faroe Islands until 1992.

Scandinavian countries today, with the exception of Denmark, are characterized by neo-prohibitionism.

In Norway (Vinmonopolet), Sweden (Systembolaget), and Finland (Alko), there are government monopolies in place for selling liquors, wine and stronger beers to consumers.

Corporations, like bars and restaurants, may import alcoholic beverages directly or through other companies.

The temperance movement in Scandinavia (parts of which are affiliated with the International Organization of Good Templars), which advocates strict government regulations concerning the consumption of alcohol, have seen a decline in membership numbers and activity during the past decades but are now on the rise again, in example Swedish IOGT-NTO having a net gain of 12,500 members in 2005.

India

Some areas of India are dry, for example the State of Gujarat.

Muslim-Majority Countries

Middle East and Central Asia Saudi Arabia completely bans the production, importation or consumption of alcohol and imposes strict penalties on those violating the ban, including weeks to months of imprisonment, and possible lashes, as does Kuwait.

Qatar bans the importation of alcohol and it is a punishable offence to drink alcohol or be drunk in public.

Offenders may incur a prison sentence or deportation.

Alcohol is, however, available at licensed hotel restaurants and bars, and expatriates living in Qatar can obtain alcohol on a permit system.

The United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates restricts the purchase of alcohol from a liquor store to non-Muslim foreigners who have UAE residence permits and who have an Interior Ministry liquor license.

However bars, clubs, and other establishments with liquor licenses do not face the same restrictions.

Alcohol is also permitted in Bahrain, popular with those crossing the causeway from Saudi Arabia.

Iran

Iran began restricting alcohol consumption and production soon after the 1979 Revolution, with harsh penalties meted out for violations of the law.

However, officially recognized non-Muslim minorities are allowed to produce wine for their own private consumption and for religious rites such as the Eucharist.

Alcohol was banned in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban.

Pakistan

Pakistan allowed the free sale and consumption of alcohol for three decades from 1947, but restrictions were introduced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just weeks before he was removed as prime minister in 1977.

Since then, only members of non-Muslim minorities such as Hindus, Christians and Zoroastrians are allowed to apply for permits for alcohol.

The monthly quota depends on their income but is usually about five bottles of liquor or 100 bottles of beer.

In a country of 140 million, only about 60 outlets are allowed to sell alcohol and the country's only legal brewery, Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi, is not allowed to export.

Enforced by the country's Islamic Ideology Council, the ban is strictly policed.

However, members of religious minorities often sell their liquor permits to Muslims and a black market trade in alcohol continues.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh has also imposed prohibition, though some hotels and restaurants are licensed to sell alcohol to foreigners.

Foreigners (but not locals) are allowed to import small quantities of alcohol for personal use.

Brunei

Non-Muslims may bring small quantities of alcohol into Brunei for personal consumption.

North Africa

Libya bans the import, sale and consumption of alcohol, with heavy penalties for offenders. Tunisia and Morocco have a selective ban on alcohol, with consumption and sale being allowed in special zones or bars "for tourists".

Sudan has banned all alcohol consumption and extends serious penalties to offenders.

The Maldives

The Maldives bans the import of alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are only available to foreign tourists on resort islands and should not be taken off the resort

CHEERS!