Danimal wrote:
The film maker Ken Burns created an excellent documentary about the 18th Amendment and the Prohibition years.
First of all, it isn't easy to add an amendment to the US Constitution. A proposed amendment must be passed by a 75% vote in both houses of Congress. The amendment then goes to the states for ratification. When 75% of the states ratify the proposed amendment, it officially becomes part of the Constitution.
I agree that Prohibition was a bad idea. However, that was a different time under different circumstances. Alcoholism was a serious public health crisis at the beginning of the 20th century. Workers were often intoxicated at work at a time when basic safety standards didn't exist. Industrial accidents killed and maimed workers at a time when workers compensation was nonexistent. Prohibition was a desperate attempt to end the destruction caused by alcohol. By no means was it a law forced upon the United States by evangelicals and teetotalers.
To be sure, a big part of prohibition had grown out of so called medicines that were mostly alcohol, and which caused children to literally become alcoholics. Such abuses of alcohol had played a major role in the rise of prohibition, though at the end when such spurious medications based on alcohol had been eradicated, it was primarily fundies, teetotalers, and Al Capone and company who opposed legalization of alcohol.
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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer