January 16, 2015 • 40 mins
Why did the US practice prohibition? Do current prohibition policies really protect the public, or are they meant to do something else entirely?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
From UFOs two Ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to now. And
with that we are back. My name is Matt and
I and Ben and this is stuff they don't want
(00:21):
you to know. That's right. If you are looking for
this podcast, you are in the right place. It is
still legal, ladies and gentlemen, UH to manufacture, import, sell,
or distribute UH this podcast also like to UH give
an introduction here as always, who are super producer? Noel
(00:42):
on the ones and twos? It is still he's also
on the threes. He's also in the threes. He's on
several numbers. It's also still legal for him to manufacture, produce, import,
and export UH podcast. That's correct. You know, it's interesting
how the control of things like ideas, things that you
(01:04):
can put into your body. It's weird the way governments
and states and other entities try to control what you
can do with your own body. And it's strange too
because what we see is that there are so many
laws prohibiting certain things. There are very few laws in
(01:27):
comparison that mandate certain things rightly. And UH. The idea
of prohibition, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are talking
about today. It's what we've been spending the whole week
on and we found some crazy stuff. Oh yes we did,
so let's get started. What is prohibition, Well, it's essentially
(01:48):
the act of forbidding something anything. Really. It's usually used
in a legal context, and it doesn't just have to
apply to something like an alcohol or a drug. That
would include things like us certain dress codes that that
are worn for religion okay, yeah, or even for legal
purposes or private businesses. The old no shirt, no shoes,
(02:11):
no service. They are prohibiting your nudity, that's right. Uh.
In the United States, the word prohibition has a very
specific meaning. Though. When we say prohibition, we're not talking
about being prohibited from walking on the grass or smoking
cigarettes by hospital. We're talking specifically about an era in
(02:34):
United States history where Congress changed the Constitution UH to
ban specifically one type of substance. Uh. This is the
eighteenth Amendment and will read just a small part here,
prohibiting the manufacturer, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within
the importation they're open to or the exportation they're off
(02:58):
from the United States and alter Tory, subject to the
jurisdiction there are for beverage purposes. Interestingly enough, you will
notice that this law does a couple of things in
it omits a couple of things because it does say
that you cannot make and cannot sell and you cannot
transport alcohol, but it doesn't say you can't consume alcohol.
(03:23):
That's right. And we found some weird things too. There
were some bluepoles if you already own some booze when
this went into effect and you got to keep it.
Doctors could legally prescribe whiskey at a pharmacy, which led
to a whole other cana badgers. Well, yeah, that was
a whole another thing. Where do you get the whiskey then? Right? Yeah,
(03:44):
which reminds me of resurrection men, where it's you where
it's legal to experiment on human corpses, but it's not
legal to buy human corps Uh. So yeah, let's get
back to prohibition. Yes, So, just for some context, the
Senate and the House of United Its States, this House
of Representatives, they both passed resolutions for this amendment in
nineteen seventeen. Then it was ratified in nineteen nineteen and
(04:08):
officially went into effect in nineteen twenty. That's right, January seventeenth,
which means it happened this week. It's the anniversary of prohibition.
So weird. It is weird, isn't it. Time is weird
and history is weird. And uh, no offense to the
teetotalers in the crowd. But the advocates of alcohol prohibition
(04:31):
in the United States were very strangely motivated. They were
not so much motivated by fact as they were motivated
by ideology. So here's what they said. They said that
alcohol would lead us to a dystopian world, that there
would be rampant crime, everybody would be an alcoholic, and
there would be dissipating moral character. Now, one ugly truth
(04:55):
about the code word or in politics they called a
dog whistle like moral character used in the nineteen twenties.
It means objecting to stuff like interracial relationships or like
women having too many rights and things like that. So
moral character is not exactly what we would associate with
(05:17):
good a good morality today, right. Yeah, And they thought
if they'd banned alcohol, they could basically save the world
or at least the United States, that you would bring
all kinds of sweeping changes, just basically saving the nation,
increasing the economy, and guaranteeing that public safety would be upheld.
And they were so wrong. In our video that came
(05:40):
out this week, we uh, we did a law called
three Ways Prohibition Shaped America, and we talked about some
of the unintended effects of this policy. Yeah, that's right.
We went over a lot of the same stuff, but
I would highly recommend watching the video just to get
more of the details. Sure, yeah, and the ways which
(06:01):
the effects of this policy completely contradicted the predicted effects. Right, So,
how has if that's prohibition, that's prohibition, United States. This
prohibition is the word. How has prohibition been practiced? So,
one thing we know is that prohibition of one sort
or another occurs all over the world in virtually every country.
(06:24):
And uh, some countries have harsher penalties. Uh in some
places of Southeast Asia. If you are caught smuggling drugs
a lot, basically a Schedule one drug equivalent of such,
you're gonna get some intense prison sentences and sometimes the
death penalty. Yeah. And some countries practice a prohibition so
(06:47):
severe their interpretation of is so severe that, for example,
I believe it's Japan. You can have trouble getting a
visa if you have a past conviction for some drugs
I think, like marijuana specifically. Uh. Then there are also,
of course prohibitions as you mentioned, on certain types of
dress that will affect you if you visit a certain country. Right,
(07:09):
that's right. We know that in the United States, of course,
prohibition did not end with the alcohol prohibition era of
nineteen nineteen thirty three. Prohibition of one substance or another
continues today. Um. You know, like heroin is still illegal
in the United States and it probably always will be. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:29):
marijuana is kind of it's it's still prohibited from a
nationwide standpoint. Then when you go down to the States,
it seems to be a routing. Um, I'm interested to
see where that goes. Yeah, it's strange to have this
podcast coming out while these laws are still in flux
and changing, and you have to wonder what's going to
(07:51):
happen because the federal government at this level is in
opposition at loggerheads with many state governments, which is a
bizarre thing. We've been there before. Well, let's see what happens.
Are you referring to the Civil War. Okay, So let's
talk about the effects of prohibition specifically in the United States,
(08:16):
and let's start with what people often call the bottom line, Matt,
Let's talk about the economic effects. Well, prohibition cost hundreds
of millions of dollars to enforce during a time when
really the average worker, the average person, let's say, for instance,
a Ford factory worker, Uh, they didn't make much money.
That Ford factory worker only made about five dollars a day.
(08:38):
So how much would you say it costs the US
government to enforce this policy. Well, according to an article
that I was looking at from PBS, uh and it
cost over three hundred million dollars in nineteen twenties and
nine twenty dollars, which is, if you convert that to
two thousand and fifteen, that equals roughly thirty seven billion.
(09:00):
That's a lot of scratch, my friends. That is just
to prevent people from drinking a substance that you were
already making money on before. Uh. And at the national level,
we see that prohibition had a hidden cost, which was
tax revenue that was lost. People would pay excise tax
(09:20):
form or sometimes called a sin tax on boos right. Uh.
In the nineteen twenties, This equal to eleven billion dollars
in lost tax revenue. And we're talking about a period
from nineteen twenty to I think nineteen thirty three. Yeah,
so that's you know, that's a long while there, thirteen years.
But still, uh man, that amount of money is crazy.
(09:43):
Oh and should we equate it as well? To By
my mind, it's only a hundred and thirty five point
six billion, So that's nuts pocket change, right, But I
guess if you're making such a moral decisions, yeah, this
is for the good of the country as at large, right,
because otherwise people start listening to jazz. Right. Um. Anyhow,
(10:04):
there were other costs too, and many of these hit states,
um the hardest. The states lost a lot of tax
revenue from this, but the private sector also took a
huge hit. So advocates of prohibition when this when this
first came out, they claimed that the active banning alcohol
would lead to an economic boom, right, because people aren't
(10:27):
spending their money on whiskey or brandy or beer or
whatever they're drinking. Instead, they're going to be spending their
money on other disposable or consumable goods soda, popcorn, exactly.
You just will spread it out. But you're gonna see
a pattern here. None of that happened. Oh yeah, let's
also say rent was supposed to increase as bars closed
(10:50):
the neighborhoods improved, and did that happen either, No, it
did not, sir. In fact, entertainment of all sorts slumped
during this time because restaurants, which are making a lot
of their money off of selling liquor. You know, let's
say Jack, who works as a bar bartender, He's already
(11:10):
lost his job, right because you don't need a bartender anymore.
But what about what about Jane. She's she works at
the restaurant too, she's a server. She makes most of
her tips off of selling alcohol. Well, she doesn't make
those anymore. You don't need so many more Janes, so
they lose their jobs as well. So these Janes and
Jack's are out of jobs by the thousands. But it's
(11:32):
not even that. It's the entertainment industry where you, you know,
you put on in a club a show, but you
make most of your money while people are watching your
show and drinking liquor. Yes, thousands of Jane's and Jack's
not just in restaurants, but in entertainment venues across the
nation find themselves out of a job because the product
that their industry directly or indirectly depends upon is all
(11:54):
of a sudden illegal. Now there's something here that that
you have for us about how the how the tax
situation affected the states. Oh yeah, this was something I've
read from a piece by Ken Burns, again from PBS,
but he was talking about how so many states relied
on these excise taxes from liquor to basically to set
(12:16):
up their state budget. And one example in particular was
New York, which he says derived almost seventy of its
money from these excise taxes. And that's pretty crazy. Where
are you gonna get that much money. I don't know
exactly what number it is, but seventy of their operating
budget came from these taxes. Funny you should say that
(12:39):
income taxes and spoiler alert for the video. That's one
of the things that we talk about in the video
that I don't think a lot of people I certainly
didn't know. Uh. I don't think a lot of people
were aware. Uh that prohibition in a way set uh
set up part of the income tax system you have today,
depending upon which state you reside of it, Yeah, exactly,
(13:01):
And we're not talking about federal income tax in particular,
we're talking about your state um and that it's it's
interesting because there are places like Florida. I don't know
if you saw what The Daily Show just did a
little thing on Florida. Anyways, it was about they kept
talking about how Florida has no income tax and that's
the reason that you should go to Florida because there's
(13:21):
absolutely zero state income tax. And uh that to me,
it's because that's a lot of money. I don't know
how much any of you guys pay, but I end
up paying a pretty penny for my state income taxes.
And we know that there were lasting health effects from
prohibition as well, so of course people who are opponents
(13:42):
of prohibition in the modern age. Typically what these opponents
like to do is to draw a comparison to other
prohibitive laws, such as you know, drug laws, right. But
one one of the things that you cannot ignore and
cannot argue away, whether you are pro pro ahibition or
anti prohibition, it's that it kind of worked in in
(14:04):
the fact that people drank less and most of the
diseases associated with drinking at the time declined except for one,
and that is alcoholism. There were more alcoholics uh at
the end of prohibition than there were before in the
you know, the teens. Yeah, because again, it wasn't illegal
(14:27):
to drink alcohol, and it wasn't like you couldn't find
alcohol much in the same way, if you are in
any city in the United States, while marijuana is illegal,
you can probably find it somewhere. Right. And one more
note about health that will segue us into the next
important point is that you're right. You could find tainted
(14:48):
alcohol on this black market. You could find alcohol that
somebody made in there are still at their house, you know.
And it's not safe. It's not regulated. Who knows what
you're putting in yourself, right, Yeah, there could be various
combinations of trace metals, chemical impurities. This stuff could not
only kill you, but it could paralyze you. It could
(15:08):
strike you blind. If you've ever seen those jokes or
those old cartoons about someone drinking moonshine and their eyes
turned to x's and they can't see anything, that's true. Yeah,
that was a real danger and it's still a real
danger if you're not buying your alcohol from a reputable place. Yeah,
but anyway, so then then we're gonna get more into
the criminal and legal aspects of or the effects of prohibition.
(15:33):
So one of the most important things to look at
here is something that apparently none of the people who
were putting this together really saw coming, and that was
the rise of organized crime, bootleggers and all kinds of corruption,
because there's so much money involved when you create a
black market, especially for something that's already so ubiquitous like alcohol.
(15:55):
We talked we talked about in the video how there
was such an infrastructure to this stuff around and produced
this stuff and when you all of a sudden cut
it off, Well, somebody's going to pick up the slack.
And people have been illegally making uh different forms of
alcohol like moonshine or something uh nash whiskey for a
(16:16):
long time. The only thing that made them illegal manufacturers
is that they weren't licensed and they were dodging taxes.
So this infrastructure to create it illegally also already existed,
but it expanded at a very swift rate when they
realized how much money could be involved here. There there's
(16:42):
so many weird ways in which bootlegging shaped modern America.
For those of you who are listening who are fans
of racing, the rumors that you've heard, the anecdotes you
may have heard are true. Bootlegging is the origin of
NASCAR racing. The people who made uh history is some
of the first racers started out as bootleggers, and they
(17:03):
souped up their cars so that they would be less
likely to be caught by the cops that they hadn't
paid off yet. This is something you've covered in car stuff, right, Yeah,
this is something we talked about in car stuff. With
the origins of racing, you also hear people say that
the origins of some political dynasties are based in bootlegging.
(17:24):
Now we have to say, allegedly, the great Kennedy patriarch
was illegally importing liquor allegedly, right yeah, so, uh make
of that what you will. We'd love to hear what
you think about this, but there is no way around it.
This channeled enormous amounts of money into the black market. Uh.
(17:45):
There are so many great says about prohibition because the
country itself seemed to widely turn against this fairly quickly,
and it became one of those easily ignored laws. People
would say things like, oh uh, Congressman will vote for
prohibition as long as they can stumble to the poll
and wow uh and we know that we know that
(18:08):
this affected the rule of law. Right. We we've talked
a little bit in our videos about corruption, but we
haven't really talked about some of the conspiracies and whether
or not prohibition works, you know, in terms of pros
and cons. So let's get to that. But before we do,
(18:30):
I think it's time for a word from very old
sponsor of ours, one of our favorites. Actually, oh excellent,
let's get to it. Well, hey there, friend, I couldn't help,
but notice you'll look in a little mobi. What's what's
going on? Actually? I am feeling rather moby. I'm stinking
(18:50):
tired all these dune the heads telling me what I
can and cannot do. No, you mean tikto outlaws, the
pro busitionists and whatnot? Oh everyone who's so sick of it?
Why can't I just do what I will? Well, buddy, unfortunately,
that's not how America works unless you're one of the
(19:11):
top top, top, top top men. Yes, I can't stand
this place. I'm going to have to go back across
the pond, I think fairly soon. Now hold on their friends,
Have you considered that, Uh, maybe it's not other people
but you whose mind needs changing the devil? You say, why,
I guess what? Have I told you? That was just
a simple pill once a day. You could be absolutely
(19:33):
fine with other people in power telling you what you
could or could not do based entirely on their opinions.
You mean drug myself so that I forget that this
is happening. Don't think of prohibit all as a drug,
my friend, think of it as an opportunity here, try
this all right, try anything once? They say, huh, I
(20:00):
don't know that I feel anything different. Well, how do
you feel about not being allowed to drink whiskey? Whiskey? Well,
I don't know, honestly, I don't know. Well, what if
I told you you can't have any more chewing gumm?
It's a devil paste? That sounds legitimate? Now, a friend,
I think I persuaded to do that. Prohibit all is
indeed the pill? Or you sure? Let's go with it? Yes,
(20:22):
ladies and gentlemen, prohibit all. Why try to change the
world with facts or figures when you can simply change
your mind with legal drugship. It all is not afforded
medicine broep. It all has not improved by the N
S A C I A T N T A B C,
the U S d A, the f D A, the
mp A. Fourth Saturday, I fine, please disntinu use of
prohibitol if you notice any of the bottling symptoms. Let's
side like this fight side having his pants, lack of
(20:43):
coffee based, stinky on, weird neck, jitters, specifics, the shovels.
Prohibit all is brought to you by Illumination Global Unlimited.
And now it's time for I don't know about you, Matt,
but one of my favorite parts of the show. Here's
where it gets crazy. I love it when you say that, Ben.
(21:05):
I think we all collectively love it when you say
that we we need to get some kind of ring
tone with you just saying that it's probably prohibited. You
think so, I can imagine where here are the facts
you can set up for people that you want to
speak with maybe, And then here's where it gets crazy.
It's interesting. A lot of people don't know this unless
(21:26):
they've listened to our show for a long time, but
you have an amazing vocal repertoire, Oh stop it all right. Well,
what we won't stop doing is talking about prohibition because
the reason we said here's where it gets crazy is
because of course we are talking about conspiracies during the
prohibition era. These are not conspiracy theories, as we say
in the video. These are not you know, rumors, are
(21:50):
tenuous connections. This is stuff that actually happened. Gangsters like
al Capone actually did network with UH bootleggers to and
sport whiskey with law enforcement either turn a blind eye
or in some cases assist. And this assistance could take
a number of different roles. You might have somebody who
(22:11):
works in a precinct who lets you know if a
raid is coming, right, and they might do that for
just the bottle of whiskey or something I know, and
that's all it would take. And you just got to
think about that corruption. We're going to get more into
that corruption that this led to, um because you're you're
talking about everything from pharmacies like where you're actually gonna
(22:33):
go pick up Remember we talked about how drug some
of alcohol were considered a drug, right, Yeah, And if
you had a prescription, then a pharmacist could dispense various
forms of alcohol to you as a medicinal thing. I
don't know exactly what that was intended to treat. It
sounds a little bit like a purposefully vague loophole to me.
(22:57):
But I was going to say medicinal marijuana. But you know,
there there, let's say there needs to be more research. Sure,
let's say there needs to be more research. We do
know that a lot of the criminal organizations would buy
pharmacies and would own them so that this would be
a front for them to uh launder booze, yeah, and money. Um.
(23:20):
Another thing that we kind of look over sometimes is
the religious aspect of alcohol for things like communion and
religious authorities that you know, they need this stuff for
their ceremonies, so it would you know, you could usually
get some for the church, but a lot of times
criminals would come in and you know, lay down their
(23:42):
law right. All of a sudden, there's a new priest
or there's a new rabbi in town who can help
you get the help you get wine or something. Yeah,
you could say there were a lot more people going
to church or to syne God claiming to be church officials, etcetera.
Um a lot more people were going to the pharmacy
(24:03):
with annabulous medical conditions, right. Uh. Corporations also had a
little bit of I don't know if this is a conspiracy,
but well, I guess it kind of is, because they
cooperated to get around the law. Grape manufacturers Ventors, for instance,
would issue these grape juice kits that would have warnings
on them that said, don't let this sit too long.
(24:27):
That's so awesome, you know. Um, the same thing happened
with malt people, manufacturers of beer. They would sell malt kits, uh,
and you know for cooking and other things like that.
But you only need a couple of other things and
you got some beer. Yes, And of course they legally
had a warning on there saying something like don't let
this sit around too long, warning it may ferment into
(24:48):
an alcoholic beverage because that would be a problem. So
there's another troubling conspiracy. Again, these are not theories. These
are things that actually happened. And if you've already watched
our video for this week, I think you know what
we're about to bring up in this show today. Yeah,
that is overall corruption from the very bottom to the top.
(25:11):
And so we talked about this corruption, but we haven't
really talked in super specific terms. And why is that, Well,
it's because it's it's tremendously difficult to estimate with with
concrete numbers how much corruption was just rampant through everything
from the very bottom to the very top at this time,
(25:32):
because everybody could get a piece, and there was so
much money being made on the black market that if
you it's almost like if you chose to turn away
and be the good person and not make the money,
it was almost like you were, uh, cheating your It's crazy,
You're you're almost cheating yourself out of the future for
(25:53):
not only yourself, but for your children. Because it feels
like there was from for me what I've been researching,
I feel like there was so much sentiment against prohibition
at the time, even from when it was first introduced,
that I feel like you could almost tell that it
was a something that would go away. I see, So
it may be felt for most of America as though
(26:15):
it were going to be a ephemeral or temporary thing. Sure,
a temporary thing that if you didn't hop on and
make some money while this was happening, it's almost like
playing the stock market. The way I see playing the
stock market right now now is that where it's this
thing that will eventually go away because it's unsustainable. It
doesn't for me, it doesn't work after learning enough about it.
(26:38):
But if you don't hop on and try and make
some money, then you know what what am I doing
with my whatever two th dollars having my savings account? Yeah,
I feel like you might be giving me a hard sell,
but you make an excellent point. You make an excellent
point about corruption because corruption is one of those things
that some studies confirm grows in sort of a no
(27:00):
ball effect way. We know that in countries today that
don't have the most uniform or dependable rule of law,
public officials are dramatically underpaid and bribes are part of
their job, as in, if they were not taking bribes,
they would not be making enough money to sustain themselves. Um,
(27:21):
in some cultures or they'll you hear them called corruption cultures,
But bribery is just sort of another tax or fee
that's on top of it, you know. And it's it's
funny because I had a and a friend who is
not from this country, and she told me that she
considered tipping you know, Americans and tippings very different u
(27:43):
in comparison to a lot of other countries. She told
me that she considered tipping a form of bribery. She's like, well,
you're just bribing them to make sure they don't spit
in your food or something. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating, um,
And I couldn't really refute her point that well, met, Well,
it's interesting to me the service industry in that way,
(28:04):
because you're you're taking the onus off of the owner
or the people that are paying their staff, and putting
it on directly on the server themselves to do a
great job. And if you don't do a great job,
you're not going to get paid. Well, you know, personally,
I always tip. I think that especially in this country,
(28:26):
you know, it's important. You would have to do a
lot to make me not tip you. It would be weird. Yeah.
I spend enough time carrying around a trade that I
understand what it's like. So yeah, I always tip it,
sometimes to my own detriment, because I shouldn't. Like you said, now,
going back to the the idea of prohibition, the idea
(28:46):
of corruption, we see something that I would like to
argue is a moral corruption, and maybe not the kind
you would expect. This was, by far, in my opinion,
that the most disturbing thing we found while came into
uh the history of prohibition. Uh. This is a conspiracy again,
(29:06):
not a theory. This is completely proven, and the United
States was the culprit. The U. S. Treasury Department specifically.
We think this is so important we based our entire
Friday or maybe Saturday episode on this. So you gotta understand.
If you are the federal government and you've decided that
(29:27):
you cannot transport or do all this stuff with alcohol,
even though you didn't make it illegal for people to drink,
you look outside your window and you see people walking
around on the street just drinking booze, and you're like,
oh man, this is this is crazy. We've got to
find another way to enforce this. So before we see
exactly what the Treasury Department did, let's give just a
(29:50):
little bit of background. The Treasury Department was tasked with
monitoring these alcohol interdiction operations. Right. Uh. The people who
were make being illegal booze were stealing industrial alcohol. There
was a problem of scale. A lot of times they
would steal it, right, and it's d natured alcohol, right, yes,
(30:10):
And D natured alcohol describes alcohol which essentially grain alcohol
that has a bunch of other nasty tasting stuff added
to it in the best case scenario. The other scenarios,
they would add chemicals that make it dangerous or impossible
physically impossible to drink a lot. Uh So, what they
(30:31):
would do, what these criminal originations would do, is they
would they would steal millions of gallons of this D
natured alcohol and they would take it to the chemists
that they were paying, and their chemists would redistill it
and make it drinkable again in theory. So this is
happening everywhere. Industrial alcohol is getting stolen left and right.
(30:55):
The Treasury Department says, you know what, We're going to
change the d naturing process. Uh So they ordered essentially
matt the poisoning of industrial alcohol manufactured in the United States. Yeah,
and it was all too scare people. It was a
scare tactic to stop people from drinking. Because if you
see that there are a couple of people you know
(31:16):
down your street who got poisoned, then maybe you don't
want to pick up that that stolen bootlegged alcohol. And
we're talking about people dying. More people got violently ill
than died, but still quite a few people died. I think, uh,
seven hundred in just in New York. And by the
by the time prohibition ended, the the government had poisoned
(31:40):
at least by some estimates, and killed over ten thousand people. Yes,
And what's strange and disturbing about this chapter in American
history is that the government itself said, uh, this is
so morally important that we can compromise on morals in
the pursuit of this higher good, this greater good, right,
(32:01):
this higher goal. Yeah, We're gonna actively, knowingly poison these
people because it is so bad. This alcohol thing is
such a devil's drink that, you know, if we don't
stop it now, just our our whole way of life
is going down the tubes. And uh. But then in
December five, prohibition was lifted, and oh, the celebration was had. Yes,
(32:26):
the celebration has had. People were back to drinking, But
of course the country did not move on completely from
the effects of prohibition. So now let's talk about if
prohibition works, because some people believe it does and some
people believe it doesn't. Clearly, clearly, there were some difficulties
(32:47):
with the specifics of alcohol prohibition, right, But other countries
do alcohol prohibition pretty well, even in the modern day.
You know, um Iran Saudi Arabia have i think specialized
exemptions for religious minorities or for nationals at embassies or
(33:07):
at hotels. But then other than that, the entire country
is a dry country. And again because of that, there
is a small black market for alcohol in places like that,
but it is not as uh, I use the word
you pick, it isn't as widespread. Well, yeah, and I
think part of it is that those were not necessarily
heavily drinking cultures beforehand the way that the United States was.
(33:29):
But let's let's talk pros and cons. We've got any
pros for prohibition, sure, Well, For one, it reduced the
amount of alcohol drinkers across the population, so fewer people
were doing alcohol. Whether you agree or disagree with the policy,
regardless of your basis for that belief, there's no denying
that in this sense prohibition worked, uh, to just stop
(33:51):
the number of people who are getting wasted all the time, right, yeah,
and then also reduce the number of serious drinking ailments
they might have, like cirrhosis, stuff like that. Um. And
it addressed the moral panic of alcohol consumption, right yeah, absolutely. Um. Oh,
(34:12):
and it also made NASCAR, which could be a proer con.
I think it's pro but it depends on how you
feel about racing, I guess. And it probably influenced racing
all over the place. Um. There are some bad things though, right. Yeah.
One thing that's probably going to be a big one
for a lot of you out there listening today is
(34:33):
that prohibition removes freedom of choice. Yeah. That is a
huge fundamental of the United States. And who knows, it
didn't work out as we've seen, so maybe that freedom
trumped somebody else's moral panic. Uh. This also promoted the
(34:54):
rise of complex organized, enormously profitable black markets, which, as
we that led to a rising crime and a rise
in corruption. Uh. That rising crime, which I think a
lot of people might not completely realize, is something that
would fuel criminal organizations for years or even decades afterward. Yeah,
(35:16):
it showed you just how much money you can make
when there's a black market. And then it translated to
other drugs, other things that were prohibited, things like sex
workers of just all that kind of stuff. It just
opened the eyes of people that maybe we would have
rather liked to keep their eyes closed. We also know
that this uh wrought unforeseen economic damage. And I know
(35:39):
it sounds like we're being very very negative about prohibition,
but these are the facts, and that's why the prohibition
era is largely seen as a failed policy. And we're
also not saying, hey, you should drink alcohol or anything
like that. It is just a fact fat alcohol is
consumed in the United States at some pretty high levels, right,
(36:00):
and well the numbers are there. If you want to
save money, don't drink there. You go for a number
of reasons. But uh, but let's talk about prohibition today.
Let's close there. Maybe the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, as
you said, December five three. However it wasn't when it
was repealed. It's not like everybody just decided to sell
(36:21):
boo hoodles of alcohol. Uh, you've got local You can
look at these maps now where you can see in
the United States where they're still dry counties because they
allowed for some local options. Let's say, where if your
municipality decided, well we still want to be a dry county,
then you could be and you can't sell alcohol. You've
you've probably been on a road trip before many of
(36:42):
you where you'll stop by a Kroger sometimes, or you know,
you stop by a place where you wouldn't normally find
alcohol and there's just tons of alcohol in there, and
then other places you'll find that there is not a
single drop of alcohol for miles right. And then you
might also run into an area that had as one
of the so called blue laws where you can't buy
(37:03):
alcohol during certain hours on Sundays, like it was in
Georgia for a long time. So now this means that
thirty eight percent of the US populations living in areas
with state or local prohibitions after prohibition. Uh. Currently there
are hundreds of dry counties across the US, which you know,
(37:26):
it's about ten percent of the area of the US
I guess would be technically dry. So you can pretty
much always drive to another area. UM, but some states,
I think it's Utah, have laws that if if they're
not prohibiting the sale of alcohol, they're prohibiting the strength
of the kind or the type that you can buy,
(37:47):
which you know, which is also the case with fireworks
in some states. So it's it's tough to be holier
than now. One part of the whole big experiment that
is the United States is that states get to make
their own laws up to a point exactly. Oh and
just a reminder, in most places, you cannot drink alcohol
on a public street, just walking around. We're just in
(38:10):
public in general, so you gotta keep that to a
private location. You probably shouldn't even if it's legal. It
seems like more of a recipe for a bad day
or a bad night than it does for an adventure.
I think anyone who's been to New Orleans Nolan knows
the consequences of a hand grenade, a night of hand grenades,
(38:30):
A night of hand grenades, And what better phrase to
end on, Ladies and gentlemen. We hope that you enjoyed
this podcast as much as we enjoyed making it. We'd
love to hear what you think about the future prohibition,
the unintended consequences of prohibition, or if you think that
we should reinstate prohibition in the United States, because you know,
a lot of people make a good point when they say, well, alcohol,
(38:54):
if you just look at the statistics, is responsible for
a great deal of suffering, damage and death, and I
would tend to agree with those people. Unfortunately, I really
really like Scotch. Okay ah, yes, Scotch. The best way
to find us with recommendations, thoughts, or suggestions for an
(39:15):
upcoming show will be to go to Conspiracy Stuff on
Twitter or on Facebook. That's where you can see a
lot of our stuff that doesn't quite make it into
an audio or video show. Um, that's right. You can
visit us at stuff they Don't want you to Know
dot Com. That's where you can find all of our
all these maybe you're listening to this, They're awesome. You rock. Also,
(39:35):
you can go to spreadshirt dot stuff they don't want
you to Know dot Com the longest you are l
in history to buy all those shirts that they don't
want you to buy. And yours came in today, Matt.
They look pretty good. Yeah, I've got my stuff they
don't want you to Know shirt and we're gonna put
it some more designs up there soon, so look out
for that and maybe even some more things that you
can put our swaggy on. Yes. So honestly, if you
(39:57):
support us in that way, it's huge for us. Thank
you so much. If you do it, Um, it means
a lot. Now, if you don't want to do any
of that stuff. What's the best way to contact us?
But conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. From more
(40:21):
on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on
Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff.
From UFOs two Ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to now. And
with that we are back. My name is Matt and
I and Ben and this is stuff they don't want
(00:21):
you to know. That's right. If you are looking for
this podcast, you are in the right place. It is
still legal, ladies and gentlemen, UH to manufacture, import, sell,
or distribute UH this podcast also like to UH give
an introduction here as always, who are super producer? Noel
(00:42):
on the ones and twos? It is still he's also
on the threes. He's also in the threes. He's on
several numbers. It's also still legal for him to manufacture, produce, import,
and export UH podcast. That's correct. You know, it's interesting
how the control of things like ideas, things that you
(01:04):
can put into your body. It's weird the way governments
and states and other entities try to control what you
can do with your own body. And it's strange too
because what we see is that there are so many
laws prohibiting certain things. There are very few laws in
(01:27):
comparison that mandate certain things rightly. And UH. The idea
of prohibition, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are talking
about today. It's what we've been spending the whole week
on and we found some crazy stuff. Oh yes we did,
so let's get started. What is prohibition, Well, it's essentially
(01:48):
the act of forbidding something anything. Really. It's usually used
in a legal context, and it doesn't just have to
apply to something like an alcohol or a drug. That
would include things like us certain dress codes that that
are worn for religion okay, yeah, or even for legal
purposes or private businesses. The old no shirt, no shoes,
(02:11):
no service. They are prohibiting your nudity, that's right. Uh.
In the United States, the word prohibition has a very
specific meaning. Though. When we say prohibition, we're not talking
about being prohibited from walking on the grass or smoking
cigarettes by hospital. We're talking specifically about an era in
(02:34):
United States history where Congress changed the Constitution UH to
ban specifically one type of substance. Uh. This is the
eighteenth Amendment and will read just a small part here,
prohibiting the manufacturer, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within
the importation they're open to or the exportation they're off
(02:58):
from the United States and alter Tory, subject to the
jurisdiction there are for beverage purposes. Interestingly enough, you will
notice that this law does a couple of things in
it omits a couple of things because it does say
that you cannot make and cannot sell and you cannot
transport alcohol, but it doesn't say you can't consume alcohol.
(03:23):
That's right. And we found some weird things too. There
were some bluepoles if you already own some booze when
this went into effect and you got to keep it.
Doctors could legally prescribe whiskey at a pharmacy, which led
to a whole other cana badgers. Well, yeah, that was
a whole another thing. Where do you get the whiskey then? Right? Yeah,
(03:44):
which reminds me of resurrection men, where it's you where
it's legal to experiment on human corpses, but it's not
legal to buy human corps Uh. So yeah, let's get
back to prohibition. Yes, So, just for some context, the
Senate and the House of United Its States, this House
of Representatives, they both passed resolutions for this amendment in
nineteen seventeen. Then it was ratified in nineteen nineteen and
(04:08):
officially went into effect in nineteen twenty. That's right, January seventeenth,
which means it happened this week. It's the anniversary of prohibition.
So weird. It is weird, isn't it. Time is weird
and history is weird. And uh, no offense to the
teetotalers in the crowd. But the advocates of alcohol prohibition
(04:31):
in the United States were very strangely motivated. They were
not so much motivated by fact as they were motivated
by ideology. So here's what they said. They said that
alcohol would lead us to a dystopian world, that there
would be rampant crime, everybody would be an alcoholic, and
there would be dissipating moral character. Now, one ugly truth
(04:55):
about the code word or in politics they called a
dog whistle like moral character used in the nineteen twenties.
It means objecting to stuff like interracial relationships or like
women having too many rights and things like that. So
moral character is not exactly what we would associate with
(05:17):
good a good morality today, right. Yeah, And they thought
if they'd banned alcohol, they could basically save the world
or at least the United States, that you would bring
all kinds of sweeping changes, just basically saving the nation,
increasing the economy, and guaranteeing that public safety would be upheld.
And they were so wrong. In our video that came
(05:40):
out this week, we uh, we did a law called
three Ways Prohibition Shaped America, and we talked about some
of the unintended effects of this policy. Yeah, that's right.
We went over a lot of the same stuff, but
I would highly recommend watching the video just to get
more of the details. Sure, yeah, and the ways which
(06:01):
the effects of this policy completely contradicted the predicted effects. Right, So,
how has if that's prohibition, that's prohibition, United States. This
prohibition is the word. How has prohibition been practiced? So,
one thing we know is that prohibition of one sort
or another occurs all over the world in virtually every country.
(06:24):
And uh, some countries have harsher penalties. Uh in some
places of Southeast Asia. If you are caught smuggling drugs
a lot, basically a Schedule one drug equivalent of such,
you're gonna get some intense prison sentences and sometimes the
death penalty. Yeah. And some countries practice a prohibition so
(06:47):
severe their interpretation of is so severe that, for example,
I believe it's Japan. You can have trouble getting a
visa if you have a past conviction for some drugs
I think, like marijuana specifically. Uh. Then there are also,
of course prohibitions as you mentioned, on certain types of
dress that will affect you if you visit a certain country. Right,
(07:09):
that's right. We know that in the United States, of course,
prohibition did not end with the alcohol prohibition era of
nineteen nineteen thirty three. Prohibition of one substance or another
continues today. Um. You know, like heroin is still illegal
in the United States and it probably always will be. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:29):
marijuana is kind of it's it's still prohibited from a
nationwide standpoint. Then when you go down to the States,
it seems to be a routing. Um, I'm interested to
see where that goes. Yeah, it's strange to have this
podcast coming out while these laws are still in flux
and changing, and you have to wonder what's going to
(07:51):
happen because the federal government at this level is in
opposition at loggerheads with many state governments, which is a
bizarre thing. We've been there before. Well, let's see what happens.
Are you referring to the Civil War. Okay, So let's
talk about the effects of prohibition specifically in the United States,
(08:16):
and let's start with what people often call the bottom line, Matt,
Let's talk about the economic effects. Well, prohibition cost hundreds
of millions of dollars to enforce during a time when
really the average worker, the average person, let's say, for instance,
a Ford factory worker, Uh, they didn't make much money.
That Ford factory worker only made about five dollars a day.
(08:38):
So how much would you say it costs the US
government to enforce this policy. Well, according to an article
that I was looking at from PBS, uh and it
cost over three hundred million dollars in nineteen twenties and
nine twenty dollars, which is, if you convert that to
two thousand and fifteen, that equals roughly thirty seven billion.
(09:00):
That's a lot of scratch, my friends. That is just
to prevent people from drinking a substance that you were
already making money on before. Uh. And at the national level,
we see that prohibition had a hidden cost, which was
tax revenue that was lost. People would pay excise tax
(09:20):
form or sometimes called a sin tax on boos right. Uh.
In the nineteen twenties, This equal to eleven billion dollars
in lost tax revenue. And we're talking about a period
from nineteen twenty to I think nineteen thirty three. Yeah,
so that's you know, that's a long while there, thirteen years.
But still, uh man, that amount of money is crazy.
(09:43):
Oh and should we equate it as well? To By
my mind, it's only a hundred and thirty five point
six billion, So that's nuts pocket change, right, But I
guess if you're making such a moral decisions, yeah, this
is for the good of the country as at large, right,
because otherwise people start listening to jazz. Right. Um. Anyhow,
(10:04):
there were other costs too, and many of these hit states,
um the hardest. The states lost a lot of tax
revenue from this, but the private sector also took a
huge hit. So advocates of prohibition when this when this
first came out, they claimed that the active banning alcohol
would lead to an economic boom, right, because people aren't
(10:27):
spending their money on whiskey or brandy or beer or
whatever they're drinking. Instead, they're going to be spending their
money on other disposable or consumable goods soda, popcorn, exactly.
You just will spread it out. But you're gonna see
a pattern here. None of that happened. Oh yeah, let's
also say rent was supposed to increase as bars closed
(10:50):
the neighborhoods improved, and did that happen either, No, it
did not, sir. In fact, entertainment of all sorts slumped
during this time because restaurants, which are making a lot
of their money off of selling liquor. You know, let's
say Jack, who works as a bar bartender, He's already
(11:10):
lost his job, right because you don't need a bartender anymore.
But what about what about Jane. She's she works at
the restaurant too, she's a server. She makes most of
her tips off of selling alcohol. Well, she doesn't make
those anymore. You don't need so many more Janes, so
they lose their jobs as well. So these Janes and
Jack's are out of jobs by the thousands. But it's
(11:32):
not even that. It's the entertainment industry where you, you know,
you put on in a club a show, but you
make most of your money while people are watching your
show and drinking liquor. Yes, thousands of Jane's and Jack's
not just in restaurants, but in entertainment venues across the
nation find themselves out of a job because the product
that their industry directly or indirectly depends upon is all
(11:54):
of a sudden illegal. Now there's something here that that
you have for us about how the how the tax
situation affected the states. Oh yeah, this was something I've
read from a piece by Ken Burns, again from PBS,
but he was talking about how so many states relied
on these excise taxes from liquor to basically to set
(12:16):
up their state budget. And one example in particular was
New York, which he says derived almost seventy of its
money from these excise taxes. And that's pretty crazy. Where
are you gonna get that much money. I don't know
exactly what number it is, but seventy of their operating
budget came from these taxes. Funny you should say that
(12:39):
income taxes and spoiler alert for the video. That's one
of the things that we talk about in the video
that I don't think a lot of people I certainly
didn't know. Uh. I don't think a lot of people
were aware. Uh that prohibition in a way set uh
set up part of the income tax system you have today,
depending upon which state you reside of it, Yeah, exactly,
(13:01):
And we're not talking about federal income tax in particular,
we're talking about your state um and that it's it's
interesting because there are places like Florida. I don't know
if you saw what The Daily Show just did a
little thing on Florida. Anyways, it was about they kept
talking about how Florida has no income tax and that's
the reason that you should go to Florida because there's
(13:21):
absolutely zero state income tax. And uh that to me,
it's because that's a lot of money. I don't know
how much any of you guys pay, but I end
up paying a pretty penny for my state income taxes.
And we know that there were lasting health effects from
prohibition as well, so of course people who are opponents
(13:42):
of prohibition in the modern age. Typically what these opponents
like to do is to draw a comparison to other
prohibitive laws, such as you know, drug laws, right. But
one one of the things that you cannot ignore and
cannot argue away, whether you are pro pro ahibition or
anti prohibition, it's that it kind of worked in in
(14:04):
the fact that people drank less and most of the
diseases associated with drinking at the time declined except for one,
and that is alcoholism. There were more alcoholics uh at
the end of prohibition than there were before in the
you know, the teens. Yeah, because again, it wasn't illegal
(14:27):
to drink alcohol, and it wasn't like you couldn't find
alcohol much in the same way, if you are in
any city in the United States, while marijuana is illegal,
you can probably find it somewhere. Right. And one more
note about health that will segue us into the next
important point is that you're right. You could find tainted
(14:48):
alcohol on this black market. You could find alcohol that
somebody made in there are still at their house, you know.
And it's not safe. It's not regulated. Who knows what
you're putting in yourself, right, Yeah, there could be various
combinations of trace metals, chemical impurities. This stuff could not
only kill you, but it could paralyze you. It could
(15:08):
strike you blind. If you've ever seen those jokes or
those old cartoons about someone drinking moonshine and their eyes
turned to x's and they can't see anything, that's true. Yeah,
that was a real danger and it's still a real
danger if you're not buying your alcohol from a reputable place. Yeah,
but anyway, so then then we're gonna get more into
the criminal and legal aspects of or the effects of prohibition.
(15:33):
So one of the most important things to look at
here is something that apparently none of the people who
were putting this together really saw coming, and that was
the rise of organized crime, bootleggers and all kinds of corruption,
because there's so much money involved when you create a
black market, especially for something that's already so ubiquitous like alcohol.
(15:55):
We talked we talked about in the video how there
was such an infrastructure to this stuff around and produced
this stuff and when you all of a sudden cut
it off, Well, somebody's going to pick up the slack.
And people have been illegally making uh different forms of
alcohol like moonshine or something uh nash whiskey for a
(16:16):
long time. The only thing that made them illegal manufacturers
is that they weren't licensed and they were dodging taxes.
So this infrastructure to create it illegally also already existed,
but it expanded at a very swift rate when they
realized how much money could be involved here. There there's
(16:42):
so many weird ways in which bootlegging shaped modern America.
For those of you who are listening who are fans
of racing, the rumors that you've heard, the anecdotes you
may have heard are true. Bootlegging is the origin of
NASCAR racing. The people who made uh history is some
of the first racers started out as bootleggers, and they
(17:03):
souped up their cars so that they would be less
likely to be caught by the cops that they hadn't
paid off yet. This is something you've covered in car stuff, right, Yeah,
this is something we talked about in car stuff. With
the origins of racing, you also hear people say that
the origins of some political dynasties are based in bootlegging.
(17:24):
Now we have to say, allegedly, the great Kennedy patriarch
was illegally importing liquor allegedly, right yeah, so, uh make
of that what you will. We'd love to hear what
you think about this, but there is no way around it.
This channeled enormous amounts of money into the black market. Uh.
(17:45):
There are so many great says about prohibition because the
country itself seemed to widely turn against this fairly quickly,
and it became one of those easily ignored laws. People
would say things like, oh uh, Congressman will vote for
prohibition as long as they can stumble to the poll
and wow uh and we know that we know that
(18:08):
this affected the rule of law. Right. We we've talked
a little bit in our videos about corruption, but we
haven't really talked about some of the conspiracies and whether
or not prohibition works, you know, in terms of pros
and cons. So let's get to that. But before we do,
(18:30):
I think it's time for a word from very old
sponsor of ours, one of our favorites. Actually, oh excellent,
let's get to it. Well, hey there, friend, I couldn't help,
but notice you'll look in a little mobi. What's what's
going on? Actually? I am feeling rather moby. I'm stinking
(18:50):
tired all these dune the heads telling me what I
can and cannot do. No, you mean tikto outlaws, the
pro busitionists and whatnot? Oh everyone who's so sick of it?
Why can't I just do what I will? Well, buddy, unfortunately,
that's not how America works unless you're one of the
(19:11):
top top, top, top top men. Yes, I can't stand
this place. I'm going to have to go back across
the pond, I think fairly soon. Now hold on their friends,
Have you considered that, Uh, maybe it's not other people
but you whose mind needs changing the devil? You say, why,
I guess what? Have I told you? That was just
a simple pill once a day. You could be absolutely
(19:33):
fine with other people in power telling you what you
could or could not do based entirely on their opinions.
You mean drug myself so that I forget that this
is happening. Don't think of prohibit all as a drug,
my friend, think of it as an opportunity here, try
this all right, try anything once? They say, huh, I
(20:00):
don't know that I feel anything different. Well, how do
you feel about not being allowed to drink whiskey? Whiskey? Well,
I don't know, honestly, I don't know. Well, what if
I told you you can't have any more chewing gumm?
It's a devil paste? That sounds legitimate? Now, a friend,
I think I persuaded to do that. Prohibit all is
indeed the pill? Or you sure? Let's go with it? Yes,
(20:22):
ladies and gentlemen, prohibit all. Why try to change the
world with facts or figures when you can simply change
your mind with legal drugship. It all is not afforded
medicine broep. It all has not improved by the N
S A C I A T N T A B C,
the U S d A, the f D A, the
mp A. Fourth Saturday, I fine, please disntinu use of
prohibitol if you notice any of the bottling symptoms. Let's
side like this fight side having his pants, lack of
(20:43):
coffee based, stinky on, weird neck, jitters, specifics, the shovels.
Prohibit all is brought to you by Illumination Global Unlimited.
And now it's time for I don't know about you, Matt,
but one of my favorite parts of the show. Here's
where it gets crazy. I love it when you say that, Ben.
(21:05):
I think we all collectively love it when you say
that we we need to get some kind of ring
tone with you just saying that it's probably prohibited. You
think so, I can imagine where here are the facts
you can set up for people that you want to
speak with maybe, And then here's where it gets crazy.
It's interesting. A lot of people don't know this unless
(21:26):
they've listened to our show for a long time, but
you have an amazing vocal repertoire, Oh stop it all right. Well,
what we won't stop doing is talking about prohibition because
the reason we said here's where it gets crazy is
because of course we are talking about conspiracies during the
prohibition era. These are not conspiracy theories, as we say
in the video. These are not you know, rumors, are
(21:50):
tenuous connections. This is stuff that actually happened. Gangsters like
al Capone actually did network with UH bootleggers to and
sport whiskey with law enforcement either turn a blind eye
or in some cases assist. And this assistance could take
a number of different roles. You might have somebody who
(22:11):
works in a precinct who lets you know if a
raid is coming, right, and they might do that for
just the bottle of whiskey or something I know, and
that's all it would take. And you just got to
think about that corruption. We're going to get more into
that corruption that this led to, um because you're you're
talking about everything from pharmacies like where you're actually gonna
(22:33):
go pick up Remember we talked about how drug some
of alcohol were considered a drug, right, Yeah, And if
you had a prescription, then a pharmacist could dispense various
forms of alcohol to you as a medicinal thing. I
don't know exactly what that was intended to treat. It
sounds a little bit like a purposefully vague loophole to me.
(22:57):
But I was going to say medicinal marijuana. But you know,
there there, let's say there needs to be more research. Sure,
let's say there needs to be more research. We do
know that a lot of the criminal organizations would buy
pharmacies and would own them so that this would be
a front for them to uh launder booze, yeah, and money. Um.
(23:20):
Another thing that we kind of look over sometimes is
the religious aspect of alcohol for things like communion and
religious authorities that you know, they need this stuff for
their ceremonies, so it would you know, you could usually
get some for the church, but a lot of times
criminals would come in and you know, lay down their
(23:42):
law right. All of a sudden, there's a new priest
or there's a new rabbi in town who can help
you get the help you get wine or something. Yeah,
you could say there were a lot more people going
to church or to syne God claiming to be church officials, etcetera.
Um a lot more people were going to the pharmacy
(24:03):
with annabulous medical conditions, right. Uh. Corporations also had a
little bit of I don't know if this is a conspiracy,
but well, I guess it kind of is, because they
cooperated to get around the law. Grape manufacturers Ventors, for instance,
would issue these grape juice kits that would have warnings
on them that said, don't let this sit too long.
(24:27):
That's so awesome, you know. Um, the same thing happened
with malt people, manufacturers of beer. They would sell malt kits, uh,
and you know for cooking and other things like that.
But you only need a couple of other things and
you got some beer. Yes, And of course they legally
had a warning on there saying something like don't let
this sit around too long, warning it may ferment into
(24:48):
an alcoholic beverage because that would be a problem. So
there's another troubling conspiracy. Again, these are not theories. These
are things that actually happened. And if you've already watched
our video for this week, I think you know what
we're about to bring up in this show today. Yeah,
that is overall corruption from the very bottom to the top.
(25:11):
And so we talked about this corruption, but we haven't
really talked in super specific terms. And why is that, Well,
it's because it's it's tremendously difficult to estimate with with
concrete numbers how much corruption was just rampant through everything
from the very bottom to the very top at this time,
(25:32):
because everybody could get a piece, and there was so
much money being made on the black market that if
you it's almost like if you chose to turn away
and be the good person and not make the money,
it was almost like you were, uh, cheating your It's crazy,
You're you're almost cheating yourself out of the future for
(25:53):
not only yourself, but for your children. Because it feels
like there was from for me what I've been researching,
I feel like there was so much sentiment against prohibition
at the time, even from when it was first introduced,
that I feel like you could almost tell that it
was a something that would go away. I see, So
it may be felt for most of America as though
(26:15):
it were going to be a ephemeral or temporary thing. Sure,
a temporary thing that if you didn't hop on and
make some money while this was happening, it's almost like
playing the stock market. The way I see playing the
stock market right now now is that where it's this
thing that will eventually go away because it's unsustainable. It
doesn't for me, it doesn't work after learning enough about it.
(26:38):
But if you don't hop on and try and make
some money, then you know what what am I doing
with my whatever two th dollars having my savings account? Yeah,
I feel like you might be giving me a hard sell,
but you make an excellent point. You make an excellent
point about corruption because corruption is one of those things
that some studies confirm grows in sort of a no
(27:00):
ball effect way. We know that in countries today that
don't have the most uniform or dependable rule of law,
public officials are dramatically underpaid and bribes are part of
their job, as in, if they were not taking bribes,
they would not be making enough money to sustain themselves. Um,
(27:21):
in some cultures or they'll you hear them called corruption cultures,
But bribery is just sort of another tax or fee
that's on top of it, you know. And it's it's
funny because I had a and a friend who is
not from this country, and she told me that she
considered tipping you know, Americans and tippings very different u
(27:43):
in comparison to a lot of other countries. She told
me that she considered tipping a form of bribery. She's like, well,
you're just bribing them to make sure they don't spit
in your food or something. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating, um,
And I couldn't really refute her point that well, met, Well,
it's interesting to me the service industry in that way,
(28:04):
because you're you're taking the onus off of the owner
or the people that are paying their staff, and putting
it on directly on the server themselves to do a
great job. And if you don't do a great job,
you're not going to get paid. Well, you know, personally,
I always tip. I think that especially in this country,
(28:26):
you know, it's important. You would have to do a
lot to make me not tip you. It would be weird. Yeah.
I spend enough time carrying around a trade that I
understand what it's like. So yeah, I always tip it,
sometimes to my own detriment, because I shouldn't. Like you said, now,
going back to the the idea of prohibition, the idea
(28:46):
of corruption, we see something that I would like to
argue is a moral corruption, and maybe not the kind
you would expect. This was, by far, in my opinion,
that the most disturbing thing we found while came into
uh the history of prohibition. Uh. This is a conspiracy again,
(29:06):
not a theory. This is completely proven, and the United
States was the culprit. The U. S. Treasury Department specifically.
We think this is so important we based our entire
Friday or maybe Saturday episode on this. So you gotta understand.
If you are the federal government and you've decided that
(29:27):
you cannot transport or do all this stuff with alcohol,
even though you didn't make it illegal for people to drink,
you look outside your window and you see people walking
around on the street just drinking booze, and you're like,
oh man, this is this is crazy. We've got to
find another way to enforce this. So before we see
exactly what the Treasury Department did, let's give just a
(29:50):
little bit of background. The Treasury Department was tasked with
monitoring these alcohol interdiction operations. Right. Uh. The people who
were make being illegal booze were stealing industrial alcohol. There
was a problem of scale. A lot of times they
would steal it, right, and it's d natured alcohol, right, yes,
(30:10):
And D natured alcohol describes alcohol which essentially grain alcohol
that has a bunch of other nasty tasting stuff added
to it in the best case scenario. The other scenarios,
they would add chemicals that make it dangerous or impossible
physically impossible to drink a lot. Uh So, what they
(30:31):
would do, what these criminal originations would do, is they
would they would steal millions of gallons of this D
natured alcohol and they would take it to the chemists
that they were paying, and their chemists would redistill it
and make it drinkable again in theory. So this is
happening everywhere. Industrial alcohol is getting stolen left and right.
(30:55):
The Treasury Department says, you know what, We're going to
change the d naturing process. Uh So they ordered essentially
matt the poisoning of industrial alcohol manufactured in the United States. Yeah,
and it was all too scare people. It was a
scare tactic to stop people from drinking. Because if you
see that there are a couple of people you know
(31:16):
down your street who got poisoned, then maybe you don't
want to pick up that that stolen bootlegged alcohol. And
we're talking about people dying. More people got violently ill
than died, but still quite a few people died. I think, uh,
seven hundred in just in New York. And by the
by the time prohibition ended, the the government had poisoned
(31:40):
at least by some estimates, and killed over ten thousand people. Yes,
And what's strange and disturbing about this chapter in American
history is that the government itself said, uh, this is
so morally important that we can compromise on morals in
the pursuit of this higher good, this greater good, right,
(32:01):
this higher goal. Yeah, We're gonna actively, knowingly poison these
people because it is so bad. This alcohol thing is
such a devil's drink that, you know, if we don't
stop it now, just our our whole way of life
is going down the tubes. And uh. But then in
December five, prohibition was lifted, and oh, the celebration was had. Yes,
(32:26):
the celebration has had. People were back to drinking, But
of course the country did not move on completely from
the effects of prohibition. So now let's talk about if
prohibition works, because some people believe it does and some
people believe it doesn't. Clearly, clearly, there were some difficulties
(32:47):
with the specifics of alcohol prohibition, right, But other countries
do alcohol prohibition pretty well, even in the modern day.
You know, um Iran Saudi Arabia have i think specialized
exemptions for religious minorities or for nationals at embassies or
(33:07):
at hotels. But then other than that, the entire country
is a dry country. And again because of that, there
is a small black market for alcohol in places like that,
but it is not as uh, I use the word
you pick, it isn't as widespread. Well, yeah, and I
think part of it is that those were not necessarily
heavily drinking cultures beforehand the way that the United States was.
(33:29):
But let's let's talk pros and cons. We've got any
pros for prohibition, sure, Well, For one, it reduced the
amount of alcohol drinkers across the population, so fewer people
were doing alcohol. Whether you agree or disagree with the policy,
regardless of your basis for that belief, there's no denying
that in this sense prohibition worked, uh, to just stop
(33:51):
the number of people who are getting wasted all the time, right, yeah,
and then also reduce the number of serious drinking ailments
they might have, like cirrhosis, stuff like that. Um. And
it addressed the moral panic of alcohol consumption, right yeah, absolutely. Um. Oh,
(34:12):
and it also made NASCAR, which could be a proer con.
I think it's pro but it depends on how you
feel about racing, I guess. And it probably influenced racing
all over the place. Um. There are some bad things though, right. Yeah.
One thing that's probably going to be a big one
for a lot of you out there listening today is
(34:33):
that prohibition removes freedom of choice. Yeah. That is a
huge fundamental of the United States. And who knows, it
didn't work out as we've seen, so maybe that freedom
trumped somebody else's moral panic. Uh. This also promoted the
(34:54):
rise of complex organized, enormously profitable black markets, which, as
we that led to a rising crime and a rise
in corruption. Uh. That rising crime, which I think a
lot of people might not completely realize, is something that
would fuel criminal organizations for years or even decades afterward. Yeah,
(35:16):
it showed you just how much money you can make
when there's a black market. And then it translated to
other drugs, other things that were prohibited, things like sex
workers of just all that kind of stuff. It just
opened the eyes of people that maybe we would have
rather liked to keep their eyes closed. We also know
that this uh wrought unforeseen economic damage. And I know
(35:39):
it sounds like we're being very very negative about prohibition,
but these are the facts, and that's why the prohibition
era is largely seen as a failed policy. And we're
also not saying, hey, you should drink alcohol or anything
like that. It is just a fact fat alcohol is
consumed in the United States at some pretty high levels, right,
(36:00):
and well the numbers are there. If you want to
save money, don't drink there. You go for a number
of reasons. But uh, but let's talk about prohibition today.
Let's close there. Maybe the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, as
you said, December five three. However it wasn't when it
was repealed. It's not like everybody just decided to sell
(36:21):
boo hoodles of alcohol. Uh, you've got local You can
look at these maps now where you can see in
the United States where they're still dry counties because they
allowed for some local options. Let's say, where if your
municipality decided, well we still want to be a dry county,
then you could be and you can't sell alcohol. You've
you've probably been on a road trip before many of
(36:42):
you where you'll stop by a Kroger sometimes, or you know,
you stop by a place where you wouldn't normally find
alcohol and there's just tons of alcohol in there, and
then other places you'll find that there is not a
single drop of alcohol for miles right. And then you
might also run into an area that had as one
of the so called blue laws where you can't buy
(37:03):
alcohol during certain hours on Sundays, like it was in
Georgia for a long time. So now this means that
thirty eight percent of the US populations living in areas
with state or local prohibitions after prohibition. Uh. Currently there
are hundreds of dry counties across the US, which you know,
(37:26):
it's about ten percent of the area of the US
I guess would be technically dry. So you can pretty
much always drive to another area. UM, but some states,
I think it's Utah, have laws that if if they're
not prohibiting the sale of alcohol, they're prohibiting the strength
of the kind or the type that you can buy,
(37:47):
which you know, which is also the case with fireworks
in some states. So it's it's tough to be holier
than now. One part of the whole big experiment that
is the United States is that states get to make
their own laws up to a point exactly. Oh and
just a reminder, in most places, you cannot drink alcohol
on a public street, just walking around. We're just in
(38:10):
public in general, so you gotta keep that to a
private location. You probably shouldn't even if it's legal. It
seems like more of a recipe for a bad day
or a bad night than it does for an adventure.
I think anyone who's been to New Orleans Nolan knows
the consequences of a hand grenade, a night of hand grenades,
(38:30):
A night of hand grenades, And what better phrase to
end on, Ladies and gentlemen. We hope that you enjoyed
this podcast as much as we enjoyed making it. We'd
love to hear what you think about the future prohibition,
the unintended consequences of prohibition, or if you think that
we should reinstate prohibition in the United States, because you know,
a lot of people make a good point when they say, well, alcohol,
(38:54):
if you just look at the statistics, is responsible for
a great deal of suffering, damage and death, and I
would tend to agree with those people. Unfortunately, I really
really like Scotch. Okay ah, yes, Scotch. The best way
to find us with recommendations, thoughts, or suggestions for an
(39:15):
upcoming show will be to go to Conspiracy Stuff on
Twitter or on Facebook. That's where you can see a
lot of our stuff that doesn't quite make it into
an audio or video show. Um, that's right. You can
visit us at stuff they Don't want you to Know
dot Com. That's where you can find all of our
all these maybe you're listening to this, They're awesome. You rock. Also,
(39:35):
you can go to spreadshirt dot stuff they don't want
you to Know dot Com the longest you are l
in history to buy all those shirts that they don't
want you to buy. And yours came in today, Matt.
They look pretty good. Yeah, I've got my stuff they
don't want you to Know shirt and we're gonna put
it some more designs up there soon, so look out
for that and maybe even some more things that you
can put our swaggy on. Yes. So honestly, if you
(39:57):
support us in that way, it's huge for us. Thank
you so much. If you do it, Um, it means
a lot. Now, if you don't want to do any
of that stuff. What's the best way to contact us?
But conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. From more
(40:21):
on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on
Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.