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> From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success. Do you count skyrocketing murder rate and gov't-poisoned hooch in your metric for success?

• idlewords 10y ago
  Sure do. It takes a lot of murder and poison to offset a 20% drop in cirrhosis. Read the paper linked below.
  • adrusi 10y ago
    If you're only counting death rates then yeah, the murder is better than the cirrhosis. But the actual experience of living in a society where anyone might be murdered in the street is significantly worse than the experience of living in a society where you can just not drink and not get cirrhosis. Obviously alcoholics can't just "not drink", but prohibition was never going to be a pleasant experience for them.
  • philhartmanonic 10y ago
    Great, and how do you quantify the value of the freedom to live your life the way you want to? Soa decrease in deaths of cirrhosis is beneficial, presumably as it extends lives. Is the extension of life an inherent benefit? If you lived for 10,000 years in abject misery would that be better than dying in 6 months? Clearly, it's conditional. Life is complex, every life is unique, so you can safely assume you aren't going to make things better when you try to violently protect people from themselves. If you were arguing about the drop in domestic abuse that'd be one thing, but cirrhosis from alcohol consumption is self-inflicted. Universally falls squarely in the "mind your own business, jack" space.
    • deleted 10y ago
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