Prohibition didn't work

As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in "Last Call," his witty and exhaustive new history of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experiment created nothing like a virtuous teetotaler's paradise. The 18th Amendment, in fact, didn't so much end the country's drinking culture as merely change its ethos, replacing the male-dominated saloon with the sexually integrated speakeasy and turning a public pastime into a surreptitious exercise in cynicism and hypocrisy. "The drys had their law," as Okrent observes, "and the wets would have their liquor." And the bootleggers would have their obscene and blood-soaked profits, blissfully free of state and federal taxes.

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