Prohibition ended in the United States

On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified, repealing the Eighteenth and ending the nationwide ban on making, selling, and transporting alcohol. It remains the only amendment ever adopted to repeal a previous amendment, and the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures.

Prohibition had taken effect in 1920, but the experiment proved famously unenforceable. Bootlegging, speakeasies, and organized crime flourished, while the promised moral renewal never arrived. By the early 1930s, with the Depression deepening, many Americans saw repeal as both a fiscal and a practical relief.

“The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”

When the thirty-sixth state ratified that afternoon, the three-fourths threshold was met and certified at once. After roughly fourteen years, the country’s brief, contentious era of legal abstinence was over, leaving alcohol regulation largely to the individual states.