The failed experiment with alcohol prohibition in the United States (1920-1933) is known, which is usually analyzed from the point of view of the violence associated with the illegal alcohol trade that occurred in the cities of that country. What is often less well known is the reaction to this United States policy by other countries that have continued to produce and market alcohol across borders. Far from embracing prohibitionism, many governments turned a blind eye to the criminalization of alcohol that the United States government sought to internationalize.

In the book A Nation of Smugglers: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas tells the story of the “Rum Row” or rum runner. Andreas points out that much of the alcohol smuggled into the United States entered via the Atlantic coast and the Canadian border to the north. Despite the name, much of the smuggled alcohol was not rum, but whiskey, and much of the liquor’s supply came from British distilleries. When the United States consul in Nassau, Bahamas, conveyed his government’s demands that the British government take strong action to combat the growing liquor trade in its Caribbean colonies, the Colonial Office replied: “We are doing all we can for you, but we cannot be of expects them to infringe on the prerogatives of our own people to help them enforce one of their absurd laws.” Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies from February 1921, took a similar view, saying that “a state is responsible only for the application of its own laws.”

During…prohibition, the authorities never managed to stop the supply of alcohol on the market…

Andreas explains that “Prohibition’s own success in raising prices was also the source of its own decline. The high financial stakes are also what made the illegal trade so violent.”

But as the police powers of the US federal government increased their capacity to combat rum runners, the illegal trade across the northern border with Canada became much more important. The main entry point was the Detroit River. Motorized boats could transport shipments of whiskey to American soil in less than 5 minutes. The city of Detroit became a logistics center for the processing and distribution of alcohol, and the liquor trade became the second industry behind the automobile industry. In 1929, revenue from alcohol export taxes in Canada was double that of income taxes. Income from taxes on whiskey imports from Great Britain also increased by a factor of almost 6 between 1918 and 1922. The French also entered the American market through Canada, increasing, for example, the export of Moet et Chandon by more than tenfold between 1922 and 1929.

During the Prohibition era, the authorities were never able to stop the supply of alcohol on the American market, as the futile attempt to stop it led to great violence and corruption in certain cities where the illegal trade was concentrated. (OR)