@Draugnar the US ban on alcohol did work, the amount of alcoholism dropped exponentially during prohibition. We still are not back up to pre-prohibition levels of alcoholism in the US.

Scooter, even if that's true, you should look up what a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is, because you're apparently unaware that you just made one.

@oscarjd74 What else do you chalk the exponential decrease up to then? I am not a huge fan of saying that laws change citizens, but it seems pretty apparent that's the case with prohibition.

In other words, people like Oscar can make statements completely unsubstantiated by any data, and then decry that any data which disagrees with their conclusion is a 'logical fallacy', even though alcoholism was rising exponentially prior to prohibition.

I don't know if it's okay to post links here, but if it's not check out this article http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

quickly*

Another factor that might have been significant is the fact that the start of the Great Depression pretty much coincided with the end of the prohibition. Unemployment rose to 25% in those days in the US. Desperate people are more prone to alcohol abuse I suspect.

Now Putin, if I were to state that the Great Depression caused the increased alcohol consumption then that would fit the data just as well as your hypothesis that it was the end of the prohibition. Do you now understand the fallacy? Or do I need to spell it out even more?

I understand the fallacy, you just feel right into it.

fell*

You're not paying attention Oscar.

The point is alcoholism was rising *prior to prohibition*, and after prohibition ended it did not go back to pre-prohibition levels. The point is not that consumption skyrocketed after prohibition ended, because it did not.

So actually the Great Depression point is an even more remarkable indicator of how prohibition worked at destroying production in the USA.

From wikipedia: "Scholars estimate that consumption dropped to a low of about 60% of pre-prohibition levels around 1925, rising to almost 80% before the law was officially repealed."

Apparently the consumption started to rise again well before the prohibition was repealed. So the decrease might have just had to do with a reduced availability as the mafia needed some time to organize the illegal trade in alcoholic beverages. I'm not sure that was the cause, but this data certainly seems to falsify the hypothesis that consumption rose due to the prohibition being repealed.