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The story
On 5ch’s Livegalileo (“Nandemo Jikkyo”) board, a post arguing “alcohol is no different from drugs, so it might as well be banned” sparked a wide-ranging debate. Opponents pointed to America’s Prohibition era (1920–33), which failed after fueling bootlegging and black markets, while supporters countered that “if you fix what caused it to fail back then, it could work this time.” The thread also touched on gradually curbing demand through tax hikes and tighter rules the way cigarettes have been handled, what to do about cooking sake, and whether home brewing should be allowed — with opinions split over where exactly to draw the line between banning, regulating, and leaving things as they are.
What people said
That theory's wrong, actually
It's not about whether it's good for your health — the point is it causes crime
People still say this like it's some smug gotcha — even though the era and the circumstances were completely different
People bring this up sometimes, but if something failed, I'd think you're supposed to try again and get it right — yet somehow with Prohibition it's always "it failed once, so never again."
Why is it only Prohibition that gets "it failed, so don't ever try it again"?
There are people out there who say meth and other drugs should be banned too. In Japan there are also people who say ordinary citizens shouldn't be allowed to own handguns.
There's a type of person who wants to erase anything they personally dislike — and that type can never see the other people out there who are actually saved by the thing they want gone.
Can't you just use water instead?
If there were a way to avoid repeating the same failure, it would've been done by now. The fact that it hasn't means people learned from that past failure.
Beer or whatever, sure, but fruit wine and the like aren't really that easy to make…
White liquor (a home-distilled shochu-type spirit) — no way you're making that at home.
Drugs aren't exactly sold over the counter at stores, though.
It's fine without it, no?
Do the exact same thing with alcohol. Turn bars that serve it into cage-like holding pens, and isolate the people drinking inside. When they want to leave, measure their breath, and the key-lock only releases if they're under a certain level. Not a ban — quarantine.
Just raise the liquor tax tenfold. Prices go up, but you can still drink if you really want to — so demand for alcohol gradually declines.
Something like 500 yen for a canned chu-hi sounds about right. Though it'd probably wreck the restaurant industry.
Exactly. Keep it at a level where you can still drink if you really want to, but it's not something you'd casually reach for. Do that for ten years and drinking culture will probably decline the same way smoking did.
Follow "it's not irreplaceable, so it's fine to regulate" far enough and you end up with those in power regulating whatever suits them.
If anything, it's people who try to control others like that who should be the ones getting banned.
Just raise the tax on gambling too. If pachinko addicts were working instead of playing pachinko, tax revenue would go up anyway — so claw that money back from the pachinko industry instead.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The debate over whether to prohibit alcohol traces back to America’s Prohibition era (1920–33), when banning alcohol led to widespread bootlegging and turned it into a funding source for gangs — ultimately ending in failure. What divided the thread was how to read that failure: as “proof it should never be attempted again,” or as “something that could succeed this time if the causes of the original failure are eliminated.” Some suggested applying the same approach that has steadily cut cigarette consumption over the long run — tax hikes and tighter regulation — to alcohol as well, though alcohol differs from tobacco in that it’s relatively easy to brew at home and includes everyday necessities like cooking sake, so the same tactics may not transfer directly. Calls for tighter regulation also run into the problem of where legitimate public health policy ends and simply banning whatever one personally dislikes begins — a divide that surfaces again and again throughout the thread, with no agreement in sight on how far is too far.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Reiwa-era guy: “Isn’t alcohol basically the same as drugs? Might as well ban it, right?”.”
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