Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [j--r--y] at [teetot.acusd.edu] (Jerry Stratton)
Subject: Re: Drug legalization, possible pragmatic
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 01:34:49 GMT

[j--re--y] at [snrc.uow.edu.au] writes:
>[w--li--t] at [athena.Eng.Sun.COM] (William T) writes:
>>[int 877 w] at [lindblat.cc.monash.edu.au] (William Fang) writes:
>>This is unclear.  Alcohol use and abuse *decreased* after prohibition ended.
>I've seen this mentioned several times on this group (and I am inclined to
>believe it), but what is the evidence for it? 

If you measure alcohol use by amount of alcohol in the drinks, it may
have gone down. Certainly, the use of distilled liquors has been going
down since the end of prohibition (and it was going down *before*
prohibition, too; prohibition managed to change that).

According to Larry Englemann, in _Intemperance_, alcohol use dropped
only 30 to 50% during prohibition. Of course, the alcohol still in use
was mostly distilled spirits. And according to Erich Goode, in
_Drugs in American Society_, cirrhosis of the liver was at 12-17 per
100,000 each year between 1900 and 1919; 7-9 per 100,000 in the 1920s and
early 1930s, and in the mid-1930s, it began to rise again. This has been
used as an indication that prohibition (in effect from the early twenties
to the early thirties (1933) reduced alcohol _abuse_, but this fails to
take into account the amount of time it takes for cirrhosis of the liver to
develop. It seems fairly clear that abuse, at least, *did* rise during
prohibition.

Jerry Stratton
[j--r--y] at [teetot.acusd.edu] (Finger/Reply for PGP Public Key)
------
>Just another reason that Prodigy is a piece of sh*t.
Hey, man, this isn't Prodigy! You can spell 'shit' out if you want to!
                            -- Doug McNaught