An anonymous article in the 25 September 1926 issue of The New Yorker relates the story of a man who was a waiter at Sherry’s, a well-known restaurant, when the Prohibition Act was passed on 17 January 1920. He writes ‘When prohibition came [...] my income deteriorated.’1 Four years after prohibition, this man was running a profitable bootlegging business, and had accumulated wealth which included ‘more than $100,000 invested in safe securities,’2. The act itself was intended to do quite the opposite — to ‘destroy the agency that debauches the youth of the land and thereby perpetuates its hold upon the Nation.’3.Pre-Prohibition America was a checkerboard of wet and dry states; wet states allowed the manufacture, import, and distribution of alcohol whereas dry states prohibited them entirely. The state of Maine was the first to go dry, in 1851, as a direct result of lobbying by the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, an organisation founded in 1826. America had many temperance leagues at the time, including the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) which led the charge towards the Prohibition Act. As the number of dry states rose — from 4 in 1900 to 7 in 1909 — the liquor industry launched a concerted counter-offensive: from 1900 to 1913 beer production jumped from 1.2 billion to 2 billion gallons, and tax-paid spirits rose from 97 million to 147 million gallons.4 However, alcohol-related health problems, such as liver cirrhosis and chronic alcoholism, rose to match — a catalyst for temperance movements, who often cited these numbers in their arguments and recruited many health professionals to their cause.The temperance movements were the eventual winners; on 16 January 1919, the 18th Amendment, which constitutionally prohibited the production, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, was ratified. This was followed by the Volstead Act on 28 October 1919 (named after Andrew Volstead of the House Judiciary Committee), an informal term for the National Prohibition Act, which provided for the enforcement of the 18th Amendment. It defined ‘intoxicating liquor’ and outlined the legal framework for enforcement. Prohibition became a nationwide reality on 17 January 1920 when the amendment came into effect. As the act was ratified and only then drafted, its exact nature was largely unknown. The public were therefore surprised that ‘intoxicating liquor’ was defined as any substance that contained 0.5% or more alcohol by volume. A light beer usually contains about 3.5–3.9% alcohol by volume, with intentionally low alcohol beverages still surpassing the 0.5% mark. Besides sacramental wine and medical alcohol, everything else was strictly prohibited. Punishment for possession of alcohol included fines of up to $5000 or a prison sentence of up to one year. The act was not without success: alcohol consumption dropped drastically from 9.8 litres per person annually pre-prohibition to 4.5 litres post-prohibition, with a corresponding drop in related public health issues.5 The Anti-Saloon League finally accomplished its titular goal and eradicated all saloons from America.However, these successes paled in comparison to the sudden rise of liquor-related criminal activities. It was during this time notable gangsters Al Capone, the man responsible for the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven rival gang members were executed; and Lucky Luciano, who was pivotal in the development of the National Crime Syndicate, a loose alliance of various criminal organisations and crime families that would plague America for nearly three decades,6 gained prominence. During this time prohibition agents arrested over 577,000 people, gangster or otherwise, for various liquor-related offences.7.The Prohibition Act was a failure, not because it failed to achieve its goals — in fact it met many of them — but because of the immense collateral damage it inflicted upon American society. Economically, it destroyed an entire industry, exacerbating unemployment, and driving economic activity into the hands of criminals, forcing many ordinary people to follow. Corruption was rife. An infamous figure at the time was one George L. Cassiday, known as the ‘Man in the Green Hat’, a bootlegger who ironically supplied alcohol to members of the United States Congress, and later wrote about his activities in The Washington Post.Eventually, its failings having become obvious to all, the Prohibition Act was repealed on 5 December 1933. Post-prohibition, alcohol consumption did not return to the heights seen in 1913 until the 1970s. A new sophisticated drinking culture, with the stereotypically masculine atmosphere of the saloon replaced by cocktail bars with more female clientele, and the memory of Prohibition resulted in the loss of temperance movement momentum. Although the Prohibition Party exists to this day, they have never held the same influence over American politics. In present-day America, alcohol remains a common part of everyday life, albeit to a lesser extent than in some other countries. As of 2019, America’s alcohol consumption per capita stood at 8.9 litres — similar to pre-prohibition numbers and nearly twice the post-prohibition value of 4.5. Despite this, it still lags behind the bulk of European countries: UK at 9.8, Germany at 10.5, and France at 11.4. Prohibition also remains culturally significant — the romanticised images of the bootlegger and the gangster persist in the imagination of contemporary society. As the anonymous bootlegger wrote back in 1926, ‘I have gotten rich, but I have made a lot of people happy. I have never run across a man in my life who refused to take a drink because it was against the law, and I have never met a man who thought I was a crook, just because I am a bootlegger and proud of it.’8.