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From time to time, people discuss prohibitions here. The general zeitgeist is often that one particular interpretation of the the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is conclusive for all prohibitions of any type everywhere and always. Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Nevermind that different prohibitions are different. We now have one data set from South Africa.
Perhaps they just didn't keep the prohibition long enough over any time period for the data to show that murders would have really gone up massively over time. Perhaps murders aren't the right measure. (EDIT: Perhaps there were other restrictions that happened concurrent to the alcohol prohibition; one might be interested to see if there are any differences in start/end dates for other restrictions and see if there is something like a DiD.) Lots of interpretations, but only one limited data set. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury belief of mine.
I doubt that murders will really have gone up massively with a persistent ban, but I would also expect that alcohol consumption that would diminish sharply with a small on/off switch would be down by less with a long-term, planned, codified ban. Telling people they can't buy something for a few weeks might engender a few oddball workarounds, but it doesn't result in the development of long-term, sustainable institutions of illegal production and distribution (which we see develop with any in-demand black market item).
I do agree that there's a stylized version of American Prohibition where people just accept a simple narrative and engage in some motivated reasoning about how their preferred policy was the right thing in all ways. I'm sure there really were tradeoffs and that some sorts of violence would go down with alcohol bans. Ultimately, I'm against prohibition because I like alcohol and don't like the government, not because I have high confidence that it actually increases violence. I don't think this is a luxury belief in the traditional sense - I am aware that this is probably bad for some people and I don't think I gain any performative social esteem from holding it.
Yup.
The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].
The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.
So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.
It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.
One option would be to make the thing not 100% verboten, but a massive hassle to have legally, like Title II weapons.
For example, you could still sell alcohol in bars and restaurants, but they would have to close at 9pm. Not stop selling alcohol (easily exploitable), close outright. No alcohol in grocery stores, only in designated liquor stores that have to be at least 10000 feet away from the nearest grocery store, cannot open earlier than 10am or close later than 4pm, must stay closed on weekends and holidays, can't take cash, can't sell more than 200ml of ethanol to a customer per day.
Bringing alcohol for personal use from another county would be legal, but you would have to declare it before consumption. You would have to take it to the police station, pay a per-container fee if you have more than six containers and get the containers stamped within two days. If you were found consuming unregistered alcohol, it would be a crime and the fine would be 10x the price of alcohol levied on both the drinker and the owner of the premises. If you were arrested for public intoxication, you'd better be able to prove you had consumed enough allowed alcohol, or your BAC would be used to calculate how much you had drunk.
All this would mean that getting a beer after work would not be impossible but would be a hassle. Your best option would be having one at a restaurant. Or driving to a wet county for a sixpack every week. Or spending your lunch break driving to the local liquor store.
When marijuana was first legalized where I lived, it was a massive PITA to get it and there weren't that many dispensaries. The illegal trade still retained a huge portion of the market share. At a certain point, legal vs. illegal isn't what people are choosing based off. It also becomes convenient vs. inconvenient. If the above rules were put into place, you'd find no shortage of "beer guys" within the month.
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