Here’s how much alcohol we consume 100 years after Prohibition
A century ago this month the U.S. passed the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale, production, and use of alcohol in the U.S. Prohibition was repealed 14 years later. In recent years, collectively the U.S. consumes about 8 trillion gallons of alcohol a year.
Efforts to ban alcohol in the U.S. began in the 1820s and were fueled by religious revivalism. The state of Maine passed the first prohibition laws in 1846.
The campaign against alcohol coincided with the women’s suffrage movement because alcohol was seen as destructive to families and marriages. When U.S. troops left to fight in World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson instituted a temporary wartime prohibition to save grain for the war effort. The 18th Amendment which banned alcohol was submitted to Congress about the same time and was passed with three-fourths of the states’ approval in Jan. 1919. The Volstead Act was passed in October 1919 and provided guidelines for enforcement.
The Prohibition era began with a decline in drinking and less arrests for drunkenness but long term enforcement was not successful. With the death toll of gang warfare and cost of policing illegal sales rising, support for Prohibition began to decline during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign was partially based on repealing the 18th Amendment and after he won, the 21st Amendment was ratified by Dec. 1933. LDS stronghold Utah, was the 36th state to ratify the end of Prohibition.
Alcohol today
Alcohol might be the drug that is the most widely enjoyed in the United States but it is also credited as the third leading cause of preventable death behind smoking and bad diet by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2017, about 47,000 Americans died as a result of opioid overdose and more than 88,000 died from alcohol-related causes.
U.S. beverage industry, 2016
Percentage of total 53 billion gallons
Alcohol consumption by years
Liters per person per year
Percentage of drinkers
The average number of drinks per capita consumed in a week, by decile, for adults 18 and older. This is from a 2006 survey of more than 43,000 people by the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions.
Nearly 30% of Americans are not drinkers, but 10% of adults drink heavily.
CDC definitions
Binge drinking: 5 or more drinks on an occasion for men or 4 or more drinks for women.
Heavy drinking: 15 or more drinks per week for men or 8 or more drinks per week for women.
Binge drinking
According to the CDC, binge drinking is the most common, costly, and deadly pattern of excessive alcohol use in the United States.
Taxes by state
Californians are said to pay more taxes than any other state but they can raise a glass to celebrate that it’s not the case when it comes to booze. Of all alcoholic beverages subject to taxation, hard liquor has the highest tax rates. Here are maps of each state from the Tax Foundation that show the difference in taxation for liquor, wine and beer. California ranks near the bottom for all three.
Sources: CDC, Library of Congress, National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Beverage Information Group Top photo from Wikimedia Commons