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by wayneftw 1896 days ago
Prohibition of alcohol
1 comments

i don't understand what societal problem you do you mean here - the prohibition or the alcohol. If you mean that the societal problem was the prohibition then we do know that it was solved by the bootlegging at a massive scale which relied on using cars and machine guns with modern communication of the time - telephone - playing a significant role too. If you mean that the problem was alcohol - i don't see where and when it was solved at all.
Bad laws were the problem, caused by societal pearl clutching. The prohibition of alcohol was solved by repealing it, not by cars and machine guns.

If cars and machine guns solved prohibition, then no substance would have ever been prohibited after alcohol. Those were not solutions.

Today we're still solving prohibition of substances, starting with marijuana, by simply repealing bad laws.

Bad laws become "bad" and get repealed when they become untenable to maintain. Cars, boats, planes, guns, drones, global financial system, crypto, social media, scientific development of our understanding of addiction - it all leads to the untenability of the current drug regime and the resulting progressive decriminalization we see.
Clearly that's incorrect though. We're only seeing legalization of socially acceptable drugs. Tech has nothing to do with it.

Nobody is fighting for meth, cocaine and heroine to become legal in the US. We also have plenty of prostitution going on thanks to technology but that won't be legal anytime soon either. It will happen when people decide they're OK with it, not because technology makes it easy.