Prohibition

• 1. Introduction

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  Prohibition, the legal banning of alcohol, is one of the most repeated experiments in human governance, attempted across dozens of countries and across thousands of years. The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1772 BCE, already contained rules about beer sellers. A punishment for selling beer for money rather than barley read: "If a beer seller do not receive barley as the price for beer, but if she receive money or make the beer a measure smaller than the barley measure received, they shall throw her into the water." That is nearly four thousand years ago, and the attempt to control alcohol through law has never really stopped since.

  In the early twentieth century alone, a wave of national prohibition laws swept through Canada, Russia, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and the United States, all within a span of about six years. Some lasted less than a year. Some lasted decades. Nearly all of them generated something their architects had not planned for: organized crime, smuggling networks, and a black market more robust than what it replaced.

  What drove ordinary citizens and governments to try such a sweeping ban, again and again? And why did it keep failing?

• 2. Ancient Roots and Moral Foundations

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  A Greek city-state, Eleutherna, passed a law against drunkenness in the 6th century BCE, though it carved out exceptions for religious rituals. That tension, between the social dangers of alcohol and the sacred role it played in ceremony, would echo through every prohibition debate that followed.

  In early twentieth century North America and the Nordic countries, the driving force behind prohibition was not secular policy but Protestant faith. Pietistic Protestants furnished much of the moral energy, and the movement drew particular strength from women who had recently gained a political voice through suffrage. The Women's Crusade of 1873 and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, organized women into a political force before they could even vote federally. In the United States, evangelical Protestant churches, among them Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Scandinavian Lutherans, pushed the agenda forward. The Prohibition Party was a major player before the Anti-Saloon League eventually took the lead in the 20th century.

  In Sweden, the temperance organizations counted around 330,000 members by 1910. That was roughly 6% of a population of 5.5 million. The scale of that commitment helps explain why Nordic politicians felt compelled to act, even when full prohibition ultimately proved unworkable.

• 3. The American Experiment

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  On the 28th of October 1919, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, known as the Volstead Act, to implement the Eighteenth Amendment. After a year's required delay, national prohibition began on the 16th of January 1920. Alcohol consumption initially fell steeply, dropping to about 30% of pre-Prohibition levels. Within a few years, however, the illicit market had recovered to roughly two-thirds of what it had been before the ban.

  Organized crime filled the void. Al Capone in Chicago and Lucky Luciano in New York City became the faces of bootlegging empires that operated openly in cities across the country. Illegal stills spread through remote rural areas and city slums alike, and large quantities of alcohol were smuggled from Canada. Detroit and Chicago grew notorious as centers of prohibition-dodging. Some 75% of all alcohol smuggled into the United States crossed the Detroit-Windsor border.

  The German American community, which had been the backbone of the beer industry, became a political casualty when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. That timing helped push the constitutional amendment through Congress in December 1917. By 1913, nine states had statewide prohibition and thirty-one others had local option laws already in place. The League had spent years building toward a nationwide mandate.

  The repeal movement found its moment during the Great Depression, starting in 1929. It was initiated and financed by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Pauline Sabin, a wealthy Republican, founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Repeal came on the 5th of December 1933, with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. States were then permitted to set their own alcohol laws, and some counties and parishes in the United States remain dry to this day.

• 4. The Nordic Divergence

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  Finland's prohibition story ran closely parallel to the American one and then diverged in a specific, measurable way. Finland enacted its ban in 1919, one of the first acts the country took after gaining independence from the Russian Empire. Four earlier attempts to institute prohibition in the early twentieth century had collapsed under opposition from the tsar. The same pattern emerged as in the United States: large-scale smuggling, rising violence, and mounting crime. Public opinion shifted, and a national referendum was held. When 70% voted for repeal, prohibition was abolished in early 1932.

  Iceland took the longest path. Total prohibition began in 1915. The ban on wine was lifted in 1922, spirits followed in 1935, but beer remained prohibited until 1989. Icelanders found a workaround by mixing light beer with spirits, a practice that effectively circumvented the beer ban without technically violating it.

  Norway banned distilled beverages in 1916 and extended the prohibition to fortified wine and beer in 1917. The wine and beer ban was lifted in 1923, and the ban on distilled beverages ended in 1927. The Faroe Islands kept their prohibition the longest in the region, from 1907 to 1992, with very restricted private importation from Denmark allowed only from 1928 onward.

  Today, all Nordic countries except Denmark retain strict government controls on alcohol sales, with monopolies operating in Norway as Vinmonopolet, in Finland as Alko, in Sweden as Systembolaget, in Iceland as Vinbudin, and in the Faroe Islands as Rusdrekkasola Landsins.

• 5. Colonial Experiments and Unintended Consequences

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  In Nigeria, under British colonial rule, missionary forces demanded prohibition of liquor. Both Africans and British colonists found workarounds almost immediately: secret stills, colonial liquor permits, and smuggling. The experiment began in 1890 and was repealed in 1939, nearly half a century after it started.

  In Australia, the Federal Capital Territory was the first jurisdiction to try prohibition laws. In 1911, the Minister of Home Affairs, King O'Malley, shepherded legislation through Parliament preventing new licences to sell alcohol. The goal was to address unruly behaviour among workers building the new capital city. Possession of alcohol purchased outside the Territory remained legal, and existing licence holders could keep operating. A 1928 plebiscite among residents led to repeal.

  In New Zealand, a prohibition referendum in 1911 won a majority but fell short of the 60% threshold required to pass. The movement kept returning in the 1920s, losing three more referendums by close votes. It did succeed in imposing a 6 pm closing hour for pubs, which remained in place until October 1967 when it was extended to 10 pm. The city of Invercargill was dry from 1907 to 1943. Residents wanting alcohol traveled to nearby areas like Lorneville or Winton to drink or purchase. The most famous illicit alcohol in New Zealand was produced in the Hokonui Hills near the town of Gore. The word "Hokonui" still conjures images of illegal whisky for many New Zealanders today.

• 6. Religion, Law, and Ongoing Bans

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  In countries where the dominant religion forbids alcohol, the pattern of prohibition looks quite different from the twentieth-century temperance experiments in North America and Europe. Saudi Arabia and Libya ban alcohol outright. Pakistan and Iran restrict it with exceptions tied to religious minority status.

  Pakistan permitted free sale and consumption of alcohol for three decades after 1947. Restrictions were introduced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the weeks just before he was removed as prime minister in 1977. Since then, only members of non-Muslim minorities, including Hindus, Christians, and Zoroastrians, may apply for alcohol permits. The monthly quota amounts to roughly five bottles of liquor or 100 bottles of beer per permit holder. In a country of 180 million people, only about 60 outlets are legally allowed to sell alcohol. Members of religious minorities often sell their permits to Muslims, sustaining a continuing black market.

  In Iran, the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought a ban on Muslims selling or drinking alcohol. Home production by religious minorities, specifically Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians, remains legal.

  In India, alcohol is a state-level matter. Prohibition is currently in force in Mizoram, Gujarat, Bihar, Nagaland, parts of Manipur, and the union territory of Lakshadweep. The remaining states permit sale. During the Joseon period in Korea, bans on drinking were frequently issued during droughts and famines, with the purpose of appeasing heaven and conserving grain used in production. A ban was issued almost every year during King Taejong's reign and again in 1758, the 34th year of King Yeongjo.

• 7. Prohibition Under Crisis

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  South Africa's 2020 alcohol ban arose not from moral reform but from a public health emergency. During the coronavirus outbreak, the government made the sale and even the transportation of alcohol outside one's home illegal, effective during the nationwide lockdown beginning on the 27th of March 2020. The stated purposes were to prevent drunken fights, reduce domestic violence, stop drunk driving, and eliminate the binge-drinking patterns prevalent across the country.

  Police, medics, and analysts estimated that alcohol was involved in or responsible for at least 40% of all emergency hospital admissions. A 2022 study found that the prohibition reduced injury-induced mortality by at least 14%, a figure the researchers themselves described as a conservative estimate, and that it sharply reduced violent crime.

  The Czech Republic's experience in 2012 illustrates a different kind of crisis-driven ban. On the 14th of September 2012, the government banned all sales of drinks with more than 20% alcohol after a wave of methanol poisoning deaths. By the time the full toll was counted, 25 people had died. The ban applied to shops, supermarkets, bars, filling stations, and online retailers alike. Restrictions were gradually eased toward the end of September 2012, and the last bans related to the poisoning cases were lifted on the 10th of October 2012, when neighbouring Slovakia and Poland also allowed Czech alcohol imports again.

  These emergency bans share a logic with the older temperance movements: alcohol produces measurable public harm, and the law can reduce that harm. What each experiment also shares is the complexity of the reversal, whether through democratic vote, public pressure, or judicial oversight, once the immediate crisis passes.

• 8. The Lone Parliamentary Prohibitionist

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  Edwin Scrymgeour served as Member of Parliament for Dundee from the 15th of November 1922 to the 8th of October 1931. He remains the only person ever elected to the House of Commons on a prohibitionist ticket. In 1922, he defeated Winston Churchill, the incumbent Liberal member, winning the seat for the Scottish Prohibition Party, an organisation Scrymgeour himself had founded in 1901.

  His path to Parliament had been long. He had stood successfully as a Dundee Burgh Councillor in 1905 and had run repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, for Parliament between 1908 and 1922. His victory over Churchill was striking enough to register as a political curiosity, but it stood alone. No one followed him into the House of Commons under the same banner.

  The United Kingdom as a whole never came close to national prohibition. A prototype prohibition bill was overwhelmingly defeated in the House of Commons in 1859. The Sale of Beer Act 1854, which only restricted Sunday opening hours, had to be repealed after widespread rioting. When the United Kingdom Alliance formed in 1853, inspired by Maine's example in the United States, it faced immediate opposition not from the alcohol industry alone but from other temperance organisations that preferred persuasion over legislation. That internal split, between advocates of legal bans and advocates of moral appeal, limited the movement's reach throughout its history. On the 22nd of March 1917, at a crowded meeting in the Queen's Hall in London, figures including Agnes Weston and General Sir Reginald Hart called for prohibition, with Hart writing that practically all unhappiness and crime in the Army was due to drink. But even wartime urgency could not carry a national ban.