The problem was caused by the underlying political problems - namely, people didn't necessarily want to ban it, there was just a very ruthless political organisation that essentially destroyed any politicians who opposed the bans, regardless of what the constituents wanted. Politicians were forced to pass it.
If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.
> If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.
isn't that begging the question? If everyone had supported it then everyone would have supported it? If you want to ban alcohol to save lives, what needs to be done is still the same...getting everyone to support it.
And we still have trouble with people using drugs today with popularly supported bans. War on Drugs, etc.
> if you take out alcohol and cell phones, you've reduced 70-80% of driving related fatalities with those two alone
I don't believe that's supported by data. A quick search finds alcohol involved in ~30% of all fatal crashes and cell phones involved in ~20% of all crashes (though probably significantly underreported). Even boosting the cell phone rate by quite a bit, there will still be considerable overlap between the two groups, so likely nowhere near 70% in total.
The root cause is that we're letting a bunch of primates steer fast moving, heavy metal objects around a highway (and really the fact that we easily distract ourselves and make bad decisions about drinking and driving is a great example of why the whole thing is generally a bad idea).
that one worked out beautifully last time around