What Prohibition Can Teach Us About Drug and Alcohol Policy Today

It’s widely understood today that drinking while pregnant is harmful for the fetus. But the link between alcohol and the health of infants wasn’t as well known in the 1930s, when prohibition was repealed in the U.S. and all sorts of people, pregnant women included, began drinking again.Because prohibition was lifted on a piecemeal basis across the U.S., some counties continued to prohibit alcohol, or stay “dry,” while their neighboring counties were “wet.” Those conditions created what economists call a natural experiment, and made it possible to track the health impacts of maternal drinking decades later. According to a new study that compares the causes of death for babies born in wet and dry counties between 1935 and 1941, maternal drinking was linked to a 3.3% greater chance of death between 1990 and 2004.The paper, from economists at universities in Singapore, Canada, and Denmark, harnesses U.S. Census data and death records collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When the population is sorted by whether they were born in wet or dry counties, there is no difference in death rates for causes like car crashes. But, the authors write, “we find that in utero exposure to alcohol availability is associated with increases in mortality rates for heart disease and stroke in later life.”The study was published in July as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means it hasn&rsquo...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Public Health Source Type: news