Can Inhibition Do What Prohibition Couldn’t?

One hundred years ago on January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect. That amendment established the prohibition of “intoxicating liquors” in the nation—and initiated thirteen years of national turmoil.

The Long Road to Prohibition

The inimitable Ken Burns produced a three-part, six-hour documentary film series in 2011 under the title “Prohibition.” The first part is titled “A Nation of Drunkards,” and it begins with the more than ninety-year history of the road that led to Prohibition.

In 1826, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, preached six sermons on “intemperance,” as the drinking of alcoholic beverages was called then, and those sermons are still available in many places online (for example, see here).

Beecher (1775~1863) then co-founded the American Temperance Society that same year. That first anti-alcohol organization was followed by the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and the even more influential Anti-Saloon League in 1893.

Joining forces, the latter two nationwide organizations spurred the election in 1916 of the two-thirds majorities necessary in both houses of Congress to propose the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Prohibition Amendment

In the last half of 1917, the Senate voted 65-20 in favor of the 18^th Amendment, and that was followed by a 282-128 favorable vote in the House. Then it was sent to the states for ratification.

On January 16, 1919, the necessary 36^th state (out of 48) ratified the Amendment, which began,

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

So, the following year on Jan. 17, Prohibition went into effect—and this was the beginning of a period of increasing lawlessness in the country.

The second part of Ken Burns’s documentary is titled, “A Nation of Scofflaws.” Opposition to Prohibition led to rampant and flagrant violations of the law and resulted in a rapid rise of organized crime around the nation, such as typified by Chicago's Al Capone.

After only 13 years, the 18^th Amendment was repealed by the 21^st amendment which was proposed by Congress in February 1933 and was ratified by the requisite number of states that December.

For the most part, legalized Prohibition was a dismal failure.

What about Inhibition?

I am using “inhibition” here as explained in Encyclopedia Britannica: In psychology, inhibition means the “conscious or unconscious constraint or curtailment of a processor or behaviour, especially of impulses or desires. Inhibition serves necessary social functions, abating or preventing certain impulses from being acted on . . . .”

And I am suggesting that since legislation was so ineffective in curbing the consumption of alcoholic beverages, perhaps education leading to inhibition (= conscious constraint) may be what is necessary.

Statistics reported in 2018 indicated that there was a 67% decrease in smoking from 1965 to 2017. That was partly because of the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packages—and a general turning away from use of tobacco by society at large. Tobacco usage greatly decreased because of inhibition, not prohibition.

Why couldn’t, why shouldn’t the same thing happen with alcohol, a drug much more harmful than the nicotine in tobacco—as made clear in the following image of “drug harm” in The Economist last year? 

To some extent, it seems that the movement toward inhibition has already begun. According to an article in The Economist’s “The World in 2020,” there are signs that drinking is going out of style. The author avers that in a generation or two, drinking in rich countries could seem outdated. May it be so!

(I wrote about this same issue four years ago, and I encourage those of you who want to think more about this matter to read/re-read that article titled “The Case against ‘Demon Rum’”.)

The Case against "Demon Rum"

Many of the great 19th-century women leaders in the U.S. were against what they considered three great evils: slavery, discrimination against women (including no voting rights), and alcohol. The first two evils have largely been eradicated. But not the third.

Jane Addams, the subject of my 9/5/15 blog article, was active in the temperance movement, as was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the main subject of my 11/10/15 article, and her close friend Susan B. Anthony.

One of the main 19^th century opponents of alcohol was Frances Willard. She is best known as the first national president of the Women’s Christian Temperance League, serving in that position from 1879 until her death in 1898.

In addition, Willard was a strong advocate of women’s suffrage, and her vision included federal aid to education, free school lunches, unions for workers, the eight-hour workday, work relief for the poor, municipal sanitation and boards of health, national transportation, strong anti-rape laws, protections against child abuse, etc.

Willard was a strong suffragette partly because she thought it would take women’s votes to pass laws against liquor. Consequently, fear that alcohol would become illegal was one of the reasons for much male opposition to giving women the right to vote.

In spite of women not being able to vote nationally, though, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol was ratified in January 1919 and went into effect a year later.  

Interestingly, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified 19 months later.

Last Dec. 22, 2015, the Washington Post published an article titled “Americans are drinking themselves to death at record rates.” According to that article, in 2014 “more than 30,700 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes,” a 35-year high.

Moreover, that number “excludes deaths from drunk driving, other accidents, and homicides committed under the influence of alcohol. If those numbers were included the annual toll of deaths directly or indirectly caused by alcohol would be closer to 90,000.”

From that and many other sources, it seems indisputable that the consumption of alcohol has a direct causal relationship to health problems, fatal and disabling accidents, homicides, domestic violence, rapes, and other negative issues, such as financial problems for those with limited means.

Of course, some will quickly say, “But that is only when alcohol is drunk excessively or irresponsibility.” While that is probably true, who ever starts drinking with the intention of doing so excessively (except maybe temporarily) or irresponsibly?

Proponents of stricter gun control repeatedly point out that guns cause some 33,000 deaths each year in this country. But if the figure of 90,000 deaths caused by alcohol is correct, guns are not nearly as much of a problem as alcohol is. Moreover, alcohol is a worldwide program.

Even though I am a strong advocate of greater gun control, perhaps the NRA and its friends are correct: it is not guns that kill people, it is people who kill people. Is that really any different from saying that alcohol does not cause problems, it is the people who use alcohol excessively or irresponsibly who cause problems?

What is the solution to the alcohol problem? Probably not more laws. But maybe a long-term educational program such as there has been against tobacco. The detrimental effects of tobacco has been widely disseminated, including in public schools. As a result, smoking in this country has decreased drastically.

No doubt the nineteenth-century women who were opposed to the three big problems of slavery, discrimination against women, and “demon rum” would be pleased if society now took the latter problem much more seriously.

Pessimistic about Gun Control

Let me be clear from the beginning: I am strongly in favor of increased gun control in this country, especially the outlawing of assault weapons and guns with high-capacity magazines. I am for such control because I believe it would save the lives of many innocent victims, such as those children shot to death last month in Connecticut.

Specifically, I am in favor of the bill that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is proposing to the 113^th Congress. That bill is basically the same as the one that was signed into law by President Clinton in 1994 and then expired in 2004.

Surely something needs to be done. For many years now the U.S. has averaged nearly 11,000 homicides per year by firearms. That is over 30 per day! That is more people shot to death every day of the year than were murdered on that terrible morning in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. Perhaps most of the daily homicides are not innocent children—but some of them are.

But I am not optimistic that meaningful gun control will soon be enacted. Both the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the opposition by owners of firearms are likely too strong for new gun-limiting legislation to be passed. I hope I am wrong.

There is one other cause of many tragic, and needless, deaths every day in this country, and that is the wrongful use (overuse) of alcoholic beverages. If there are those who think guns should be controlled in order to lessen the number of homicides, as I do, there are also those, such as I, who think that if alcohol was also banned there would not only be fewer murders but also far fewer people killed in traffic accidents.

Even though I haven’t heard them say so, I am sure that my friends who regularly drink alcohol, as some of my best friends do, would say that the problem is not alcohol but drinking irresponsibly. And that, no doubt, is true.

But that is exactly the same argument used by the NRA and others opposing gun control: the problem is not guns, they say, but the irresponsible use of guns. As you probably have heard, they often declare, If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. That might be true to a large extent.

Even though there are laws against driving under the influence of alcohol, DUI is quite common—and many people are killed each year as a result. Nationwide there are about 28 people a day who are killed in drunk-driving accidents.

Many years ago, long before there were so many deaths because of drunk driving, alcoholic beverages were outlawed in this country. But Prohibition was repealed 79 years ago last month, and there is virtually no chance of it being enacted again.

Reflecting on what happened with Prohibition and on how so many people drink in spite of all the problems caused by alcohol makes me pessimistic about any meaningful new gun control laws being passed by Congress.

Sadly, I’m afraid people in this country will just have to learn to live with, and many to be killed by, both guns and alcohol.