Celebrate your constitutional right to drink

Prohibition repealed on December 5, 1933

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when one could not legally buy, sell, distribute or make alcohol in this country. From 1919 to 1933, Prohibition marked the “driest” thirteen years in United States history with its nationwide ban on the manufacturing, importing, exporting, buying and selling of alcohol. Both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act mandated Prohibition, never banning the actual consumption of alcohol, but made it difficult to obtain alcohol legally.

December 5, 2009 marks the 76th anniversary of the Eighteenth Amendment being repealed, giving back to Americans their constitutional right to drink. The Eighteenth Amendment is the only amendment to the Constitution that has been repealed thanks to the Twenty-first Amendment, marking the end of Prohibition in 1933. Tonight, bars all across the country will be celebrating this historical event featuring costumes, music and specialty cocktails of the era and drink specials that require a secret password.

Click here for Repeal Day events in San Francisco

The idea behind Prohibition was to regulate alcohol consumption due to alcohol abuse. Instead of educating the nation’s drinking public on alcohol moderation, religious organizations and Prohibition advocates such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union wanted to enforce abstinence from alcohol and remove it from society all together. These groups felt that alcohol was the root of all evil and believed that by removing it, would help solve the social ills that were caused by alcohol abuse in the first place.

Advocates for Prohibition didn’t realize that the ban on alcohol would backfire on them, causing many more problems than they had hoped to solve. The ban on alcohol didn’t eliminate alcohol. It just made people more creative in how they got it. Making alcohol at home became a common practice during Prohibition. “Bathtub gin” and moonshine were born. Organized crime flourished during Prohibition by creating a black market for the distribution of alcohol. Prohibition killed the once respected bartending profession and the flourishing cocktail culture here in the United States by forcing many bartenders to move overseas to continue their practice or give up the profession all together. With the cost of enforcing Prohibition being relatively expensive, the government was losing money imposing the Eighteenth Amendment and had created for itself a significant lack of tax revenues on alcohol.

So today, be sure to drink and be merry. Celebrate the day in American history when the ban on manufacturing, importing, exporting, buying and selling of alcohol was lifted and that all fellow Americans (whom are at the legal age to drink or older) got back their constitutional right to drink publicly.

Sources:
Repeal Day is December Fifth
Wikipedia: Prohibition in the United States
Wikipedia: Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

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