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In reply to the discussion: Over 300 Economists Agree: It’s Time to Legalize Marijuana [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)or society as alcohol, I'm still curious as to what the effects of ending Prohibition really were. I'm from a family of teetotalers, and, of course, as a result, we don't have any alcoholics, not a one in the family. So I'm not arguing one way or the other about marijuana. I don't think anyone has taken claims of the dangers of marijuana seriously enough to even do research on the effects of marijuana, much less the real or perceived dangers.
But I have heard so much about how Prohibition was such a failure. People point to the decline in the power of the mob. I'm not so sure that the mob really lost power due to the end of Prohibition. I think they just became legal. (Some of them became Republicans and Democrats and their offspring and clones are still around.)
But I wonder whether alcoholism has become a much bigger problem since the end of Prohibition or not. And what about social problems associated with alcoholism like alcohol-related crime and especially homicides.
The graph on crime is very interesting, but it does not specifically show alcohol-related homicides or even alcohol-related crime in general. I'd also like to know the statistics on alcohol-related accidents of various kinds. How did Prohibition and the end of Prohibition affect statistics on that?
Everyone makes this claim that Prohibition was so awful and how things got better after it ended, but I have never seen statistics that really prove that claim and I would like to.