For example, in Drinking in America (first published in 1982 and revised in 1987), Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, after a careful and balanced review of studies made during and since Prohibition, note that Prohibition did reduce drinking. The average annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol by Americans of drinking age—that is, the total alcoholic content of all the beer, wine, and distilled spirits they consumed—stood at 2.60 gallons in the period from 1906 to 1910. It began to drop in the next decade due to state prohibition laws and wartime grain-saving restrictions on brewing and distilling. When statistics were kept again after legal consumption was resumed, the numbers were 0.97 in 1934, 1.20 in 1935, and an average of 1.54 for the period 1936 to 1941. (Pre-1914 levels weren’t reached again, in fact, until 1971.)
In addition, Census Bureau studies showed that the death rate from chronic or acute alcoholism fell from 7.3 per 100,000 in 1907 to 1.6 in 1919, surged to 4.0 in 1927, but was back down to 2.5 in 1932, Prohibition’s last full year. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, one cause of which is alcohol abuse, dropped from 14.8 per 100,000 in 1907 to 7.1 in 1920 and never rose above 7.5 during the 1920s. Economic studies estimated that savings and spending on household necessities increased among working-class families during the period, possibly from money that once went to drink. And Norman H. Clark’s fine 1976 “interpretation” of the Prohibition era, Deliver Us from Evil , cites impressive evidence that during the early years of Prohibition arrests for drunkenness and crimes committed while drunk fell off sharply.
