Fake Charity Nerd Girl

people who want to vote for a third party to express their disgust with the system:

can I suggest the Prohibition Party? It got 500 votes last time! Help save America’s oldest third party!

also, Prohibition was a legitimately effective public health policy, and would still be one were it reinstituted

the rest of their platform is p mixed, though, and i’m not sure most of rat tumb would find much to like in it

mostly i just like reminding people that prohibition worked

Was Prohibition an effective public health policy though?

good effects:

• prevented deaths from cirrhosis
• about 2000/year
• my original estimate was about 20,000/year based on the naive (cirrhosis deaths in 1911) - (cirrhosis deaths in 1929)
• and it is true that cirrhosis was a lot lower in the 20s than the decades before or after
• but this claims that the drop in cirrhosis deaths was due to WWI and Prohibition actually increased the number of deaths, based on timing of the drop and comparison to Western Europe (where cirrhosis also dropped but didn’t rise again like in the US). the citation points to a book I can’t read so I can’t look at the statistics
• however, it was also written by the Cato Institute who clearly has a dog in this fight 
• BUT this paper seems pretty legit and more or less backs them up, claiming Prohibition only decreased the deaths from cirrhosis about 10-20%
• prevented admissions to mental hospitals for alcoholism
• about 5000/year

bad effects:

• caused deaths from adulterated liquor
• about 10,000/year
• caused deaths from homicide
• about 2000/year
• not sure if this is causal? but homicide rate definitely increased during Prohibition and decreased afterwards
• this paper thinks it’s causal but I didn’t actually read beyond the abstract
• caused deaths from the federal government poisoning people
• about 1000/year
• apparently this is a thing that happened??
• blindness and paralysis from adulterated liquor
• unknown, at least in the thousands per year
• drunk driving
• arrests for drunk driving went up 81% during Prohibition? that seems weird, idk if there was actually more drunk driving or what
• lost tax revenue
• about $1 billion/year ($13 billion in 2016 dollars)
• cost of enforcement
• about $25 million/year ($300 million in 2016 dollars)

Of course there’s also the lost utils from drinking alcohol. And the inconvenience and annoyance of not being able to drink at restaurants, not being able to get wine or beer (most alcohol sold during Prohibition was hard liquor), having to go to speakeasies … like all of the other bad effects aside I would pay a lot of money to prevent another prohibition for its negative effects on my day-to-day life alone.

In conclusion, if the decline in cirrhosis deaths was indeed mostly not caused by Prohibition, it really has nothing going for it. If it turns out it was mostly caused by Prohibition, then yeah, it saved some lives. I’m still inclined to say it overall wasn’t worth it.

(more sources: x, x, x)