Could you imagine life without alcohol? A world where you were prohibited to drink alcohol by an amendment in our constitution! The 18th Amendment ratifications on January 19, 1920 ban the manufacturing, transporting and any sale of intoxicating liquors. When the Prohibition era in the United States began on January 19, 1920, a few sage observers predicted it would not go well. Certainly, previous attempts to outlaw the use of alcohol in American history had fared poorly (Lerner 2010). With all the research I have read it seems like prohibition ended up causing more negative issues than positive. The closing and lay off of the employees of saloons, breweries lead to loss of jobs of truck drivers, wait staff and anyone else involved in the trade. This was thousands and thousands of jobs. With Prohibition in effect, that revenue was immediately lost. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce. (Lerner 2010). This lead to an uprising in organized crime, especially, within the trade of alcohol sales. The people who ran these illegal liquor trades were called bootleggers. It is said that the growth of the illegal liquor trade made millions of Americans become criminals. It even made a lot of our Police Officers become corrupt because the money was worth it. There were two exceptions to the Prohibition law one was wine for religious purposes. Do to this there were more enrollments into churches and synagogues because they were able to obtain wine for their congregations. The other was that pharmacists were allowed to dispense whiskey by prescription for a number of ailments, ranging from anxiety to influenza. Do to the acceptations to whiskey for pharmacists the amount of registered pharmacists in New York tripled during the Prohibition era.
