The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages throughout the country. Ratified on January 16, 1919, it took effect one year later on January 17, 1920, launching the era known as Prohibition. It remained in force for nearly fourteen years before the 21st Amendment repealed it on December 5, 1933, making the 18th Amendment the only provision of the Constitution ever fully undone by another amendment.
What the Amendment Actually Said
The text is short and does its work in three sections.
Section 1 is the ban itself. One year after ratification, manufacturing, selling, or transporting intoxicating liquors anywhere in the United States or its territories “for beverage purposes” was forbidden. Importing such liquors into the country or exporting them out of it was equally prohibited. The phrase “for beverage purposes” mattered: it limited the ban to drinking alcohol and left industrial, medicinal, and religious uses outside the amendment’s reach.
Section 2 gave Congress and the several states “concurrent power” to enforce the ban through their own laws. Both governments could legislate, investigate, and prosecute independently.
Section 3 attached a deadline. The amendment would become void if three-fourths of state legislatures did not ratify it within seven years. This was the first amendment to include a built-in ratification clock. It turned out to be unnecessary: Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify on January 16, 1919, clearing the three-fourths threshold in just over a year.
What Was Banned and What Was Not
The amendment targeted the commercial supply chain. Making alcohol, selling it, and moving it were all off limits. Drinking alcohol was not. Nothing in the amendment’s text criminalized private consumption or possession for personal use. If you had stocked a wine cellar before the ban took effect, drinking from it at home broke no constitutional rule.
That distinction shaped enforcement. Buying a drink at a bar was illegal; drinking in a private home was not. Federal and state agents concentrated on producers, distributors, and sellers rather than individual drinkers.
How “Intoxicating Liquors” Got Defined
The amendment used the phrase “intoxicating liquors” but never defined it. Some members of Congress who voted yes believed the term would cover only hard liquor and leave beer and wine alone. That assumption did not survive the enabling legislation.
Congress passed the National Prohibition Act on October 28, 1919. Sponsored by Minnesota Representative Andrew Volstead and largely drafted by the Anti-Saloon League, the law is commonly called the Volstead Act. It set the threshold for “intoxicating” at one-half of one percent alcohol by volume. Anything at or above that line was illegal.
The 0.5% standard was severe. Typical beer runs 4% to 6%, and most wines land between 12% and 15%. The low cutoff wiped out virtually every conventional alcoholic beverage. Lawmakers chose it deliberately to keep manufacturers from selling watered-down products that could still produce an effect. Breweries that stayed open pivoted to “near beer,” a product just under the threshold that was widely considered unpleasant but kept some operations alive until repeal.
The Exceptions
The Volstead Act carved out categories of legal alcohol use, reflecting that the amendment’s target was the commercial drinking market rather than every trace of alcohol in American life.
- Religious organizations could obtain permits to use sacramental wine in ceremonies.
- Physicians could prescribe medicinal alcohol, limited to no more than a pint of spirits per patient every ten days, dispensed through pharmacies.
- Industrial alcohol remained available under specialized permits, though producers were required to “denature” it by adding toxic chemicals such as methanol and benzene. By the end of Prohibition, an estimated 10,000 Americans had died from drinking poisoned industrial alcohol.
- Section 29 of the Volstead Act allowed households to produce up to 200 gallons per year of “non-intoxicating” fruit juice for personal use. Grape concentrate bricks were sold with instructions warning buyers not to dissolve the contents in water, add sugar, and let the mixture sit in a warm place for several weeks, because doing so would produce wine.
Concurrent Enforcement Power
Section 2’s dual grant of authority to Congress and the states was unusual in American constitutional law. Both governments could pass and enforce their own prohibition statutes, and both could prosecute the same act without running into the constitutional bar on double jeopardy. The Supreme Court confirmed this in United States v. Lanza (1922), holding that because federal and state governments are separate sovereigns drawing power from different sources, punishing the same conduct under both systems was not being tried twice for the same offense.
In practice, enforcement was uneven. Congress provided little funding, and the federal Prohibition Bureau operated on a shoestring budget. Some states enforced their own laws aggressively; others barely tried.
Geographic Reach
Section 1 applied to “the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The Supreme Court read that language broadly, extending the ban to the 48 states then in the Union and to U.S. territories and possessions. American-flagged ships counted as extensions of U.S. territory, so alcohol aboard those vessels was illegal regardless of location at sea.
How the 18th Amendment Was Repealed
By the early 1930s, public support for Prohibition had collapsed. The law had not meaningfully reduced drinking, had fueled organized crime, and had cost the government both enforcement dollars and the tax revenue that legal alcohol sales once produced. The Great Depression sharpened the economic case for repeal.
Congress proposed the 21st Amendment on February 20, 1933. Section 1 read: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” Section 2 handed alcohol policy back to the states, letting each one regulate or prohibit transportation and importation of alcohol within its borders.
The ratification process was itself unusual. Rather than sending the amendment to state legislatures, Congress required ratification through specially convened state conventions. This is the only time in American history that the convention method has been used to ratify a constitutional amendment. Temperance forces still held influence in many state legislatures, and the convention route was chosen partly to bypass that obstacle. The required 36 state conventions approved the amendment, and it was certified on December 5, 1933.
Repeal did not restore the pre-Prohibition landscape. Section 2 of the 21st Amendment left most alcohol regulation to the states, and hundreds of counties and municipalities across the country still maintain local laws that ban or restrict alcohol sales within their borders.