WOO HOO

Have a drink on me!!

Tonight is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition – of 5 December 1933 when Utah became the deciding 36th state to ratify the 21st amendment to the constitution, and restore to the country's citizens the basic human right to go out and have a drink.

Rarely in the annals of human experience has so well intentioned an idea been such a monument to failure as America's 13-year attempt to eradicate the evil of alcohol. The National Prohibition (or Volstead) Act was passed by Congress in October 1919, overriding the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The following January, the Act was ratified as the 18th amendment of the constitution after it had been approved by the required three-quarters majority of US states.

The "noble experiment", as its supporters termed it, did indeed lead to a modest decline in alcohol consumption and an overall improvement in public health. But those meagre and transient advantages were nothing compared to the unintended side-effects of Prohibition: a drastic decline in federal and state revenues, a surge in clandestine binge drinking and of course speak-easies, bootlegging, moonlighting and mobsters, not to mention the criminalisation of millions of US citizens, including some its most eminent politicians, who were technically flouting the law of the land.

Prohibition's passing belongs to a distant age; you have to be 90 years old at least to be a surviving violator. But this 75th anniversary has a rare resonance. Prohibition was brought down by its growing unpopularity, and the indisputable evidence the measure was doing far more harm than good. But the final nail in its coffin was the Great Depression, at its height in 1933. Why should extra misery and deprivation continue to be heaped upon a population suffering so much hardship already? "The human suffering that it [Prohibition] entailed," wrote H L Mencken, journalism's bard of the age, "must have been a fair match for that of the Black Death and Thirty Years War."

Three-quarters of a century on, the US is in the throes of its worst financial and economic crisis since the Depression, one which some experts say could yet turn into the real thing. Then, as now, a new President is taking office – and the comparison most commonly drawn for Barack Obama is not with JFK but Franklin Roosevelt who, three weeks after taking office in March 1933, signed an amendment to the Volstead Act, allowing production and sale of light beers and wines.

That Utah, citadel of the teetotalling Mormon church, was the state which put repeal over the top nine months later, only proved how disliked Prohibition had become. To this day, it is the only amendment to the US constitution which has been overturned by another.

The challenges facing Mr Obama are many and massive. But the country's drinking laws are mercifully not among them. Even so, Prohibition marks American government and society to this day. The modern Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is a direct descendant of the Bureau of Prohibition (later briefly the FBI's delightfully named Alcohol Beverage Unit) that was set up to enforce the 1919 act. Hundreds of "dry" towns and counties are still to be found in the US, many of them in the South and Appalachian states. Mississippi only ratified repeal of Prohibition in 1966, while more than a dozen states still ban the sale of hard liquor on Sundays.

Full story http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/in-the-us-its-time-to-party-like-its-1933-1052545.html

cheers...