The act of prohibiting or the condition of being prohibited. A law, order, or decree that forbids something. The forbidding by law of the manufacture, transportation, sale, and possession of alcoholic beverages. Prohibition Prohibition, legal ban on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating drink. By extension, the term also denotes those periods in history when such bans have been in force, as well as the political and social movements advocating them.
Some countries have for centuries forbidden even the moderate use of fermented drink.
In the West, however, efforts to ban the consumption of alcohol have been a relatively recent phenomenon. Prohibition in the United States In England and the American colonies during the late 1700s many people believed a close relationship existed between drunkenness and the rising incidence of crime, poverty, and violence. In the Women's War, which broke out in 1873, thousands of women marched from church meetings to saloons, where with prayer and song they demanded that saloonkeepers give up their businesses. By 1900 millions of men and women were beginning to share this hostility toward the saloon and to regard it as the most dangerous social institution then threatening the family. By 1916 many states closed the saloons and prohibited the manufacture of any alcoholic beverages.