PROHIBITION

It is important to know the history of prohibition and why at one time it was illegal to distribute or manufacture alcohol.
The 18th Amendment to the U.S Constitution banned the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States.
Although it wasn’t illegal to consume it, it was illegal to buy it, produce it or even be in possession of alcoholic beverages.
The laws that we have today have been constructed around this piece of history.
This is one of the reasons it is important to know about where these laws came from. This dates back to the 1800’s when Religious groups that had considered alcohol or being drunk a “National Curse.” Being “drunk” in public was frowned upon. The first temperance legislation appeared in 1838 in the form of a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of spirits in less than 15­gallon quantities. It was repealed two years later but Maine was the first state to pass the prohibition law in 1846, and by the time the civil war had begun, other states had followed passing state prohibition laws. The Amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, when it passed the
Senate after it had passed the House a day earlier.
This Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919 and went into effect one year later on
January 16, 1920. Colorado ratified the Amendment on January 15, 1919. It took 394 days to ratify the Amendment, which was achieved on January 16, 1919.
36 of the 48 states (Hawaii and Alaska were not part of the U.S yet) to ratify.
There was a deadline though. So many states had to ratify within 7 years or else it would have not gone into effect. ( Section Three of the Eighteenth Amendment)
On December 5, 1933 the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment. In that decade there was a lot that had happened in the U.S.
Bootlegging or the illegal sale, manufacturing and transportation of alcohol became widespread and made many citizens rich by breaking the law. It wasn’t very safe though.
Many people were making moonshine and other types of liquor out of various chemicals and killing many people from illness. Crime rate went way up including gambling and prostitution. Mobsters and the Mafia were kind of in control of bootlegging. They made

huge amounts of money.
Though popular opinion believes that Prohibition failed, it succeeded in cutting overall alcohol consumption in half during the 1920s, and consumption remained below pre­Prohibition levels until the 1940s. It also put