The particular emphasis and theme of this article will be on understanding why the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, ratified into law in January 1920, puts under the ban, the production, distribution and sale of intoxicating alcohol was always predestined to failure. To fully understand why this “Nobel experiment” was doomed to fail from the beginning, the article must first look back at the historical connection between the American people and alcohol. In order to contextualize the place of alcohol in American society, this essay will take a fleeting look at figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but more importantly, it will examine the intrinsic connection between alcohol and the broader population. The essay will examine how this sometimes destructive relationship people had with alcohol turned into the great social experiment, Prohibition. The article will examine the anxiety held, mostly by Protestant Americans, that alcohol was at the center of all of society's ills and how this led to the emergence of myriad groups as diverse as the Washingtonians, Women's Temperance and the Women's Temperance movement. Christian Temperance Union; and how all of these were overshadowed by the emergence of the Anti-Saloon league. The article will pay particular attention to how the arrival of the most powerful and influential single-issue lobby group ever to emerge on the American political scene laboriously paved the way for the introduction of the Eighteenth Amendment. The essay will also examine the influence the Anti-Saloon League had in drafting the Volstead Act, the law designed to enforce Prohibition, and how the resulting exploitable loopholes turned millions of Ame...... middle of paper. ... ..ens. Over time, due to the extensive exploitation of these loopholes, the law did not stand up and lapsed; which proved to be an almost prophetic miniaturization of the decline of the national prohibition law over eighty years later. By the 1860s, the several temperance reform movements that flourished were sidelined, first by the growing struggle against slavery, and then by the Civil War. that was fought to resolve. In 1862, the federal government, desperate for revenue to finance the war effort, imposed an excise tax on the sale and production of alcohol; and within a few years one-third of the entire federal budget was raised from this liquor tax. The federal government's introduction of and reliance on this excise tax would decimate the temperance movements, until their reemergence, in the guise of the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League, eleven years later..