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Alcohol prohibition is not entirely wrong...
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Unpopular Opinion
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People talk like alcohol is this untouchable pillar of society but, like, there's one big prohibition success story being ignored here. The core problem with the original Prohibition is that it didn't build up public legitimacy for such a move before doing it.
Very good success story when "proper punishment is flogging, though legal scholars disagree over whether the number of lashes should be 40 or 80".
I mean, it worked, hence success story. Besides, there's no nice way to enforce something via state violence, and Muslim flogging (as opposed to the stuff, say, Singapore is famous for) isn't any more brutal than the crippling fines or imprisonment doled out by modern states.
Hate to spoil things but I know lot of Muslims that regulary consume alcohol. Also alcoholis not banned in modern muslim countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, Albania. It's ban in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, ... all democratic countries.
I mean, sure, but those are (outside the Balkans) the overwhelming minority. Most of the first 30 or so entries on the list of countries by alcohol consumption per capita are Muslim countries for a reason.
It's not banned in most of them, but Muslims (for the most part) don't drink it anyway, because irrespective of the law the religious prohibition is taken seriously. That's what I meant by public legitimacy: Islam got the vast majority of Muslims to quit alcohol by giving them a reason to do so (that reason being "God said so").