The so-called War on Drugs has criminalized drug use in the United States. Even so, drugs continue to be common. Some have compared it to Prohibition and the failed Eighteenth Amendment.
Prohibition was simply the banning of alcohol. Many of the same reasons for Prohibition are used for the War on Drugs: increasing public health, lowering crime rates and the like.
However, Prohibition failed completely. After only a couple of years, people were drinking anywhere from 60 to 70 percent as much alcohol as they had been before, so there wasn't a very good decline in use. Moreover, illegally produced alcohol often had a lower quality and a higher potency, so overdoses and alcohol poisoning were common.
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