Cigarettes are a counter example to this idea of "prohibitionism" not working.

It took incredible societal level effort to change the culture around cigarettes.

Most anyone who thinks something is bad and wants that behavior reduced might naively want to ban it, and then they realize nobody likes being told what to do and they make enemies out of otherwise allies. On the other hand very few people are capable of associating consequences to their actions in ways that change their actions. This does create a real problem for society. Cigarette smokers were stealing the public air inside of restaurants and causing undue burden on public health.

People who are against things like drinking alcohol should take a page out of anti-tobacco's book.

Cigarettes were salami sliced away.

They removed smoking zones from restaurants, started to restrict where smoking could be done. They increased the tax on cigarettes. They showed commercials about the awful consequences of smoking. They had health care professionals bring around smokers lungs to elementary school students. They repeated cigarettes == cancer so many times in so many different forms of media. They had pictures of people with the hole in their throat speaking with the vibrating neck tool. They showed pictures of teeth. There was media about the thick layer of nasty residue on the inside of homes. Forest fires, couch fires and the like were tied to cigarette usage. There were cigarette butts littered absolutely everywhere. They resitcted use of cigarettes in movies. They restricted advertising to children. They overturned the pro tobacco research. They had lesson plans about "corrupted tobacco research" in high school. There was significant amount of conversation around second hand smoke and how second hand smoke harms your kids. They should how chewing tobacco was harmful. They showed how harmful all the cigarette aditivies were. They made nicotine patches and created treatment plans.

Now if you smoke in the US, you are basically advertising that you are a low class peasant who doesn't care about themselves and can't control themselves. Smoking is very uncool. Smoking is very low status behavior. That absolutely was not the attitude 30 years ago.

Going to foreign countries, it's shocking to smell cigarettes. Going to japan and entering a cafe and smelling cigarette smoke is absolutely jarring.

The US didn't ban cigarettes, but they made them very very uncool. They repeated the consequences of cigarette use enough that people eventually internalized them.

So you can be a prohibitionist, and that doesn't help anybody, but I do agree with the general sentiment that alcohol harms society more than it helps and to make changes you must change the culture.

Changing the culture requires telling the truth to people who don't want to hear it and eventually using force ("you can't smoke here" is a use of force) in a gradually increasing way.

Prohibition failed for the reason many software projects fail. It tried to make a large change at once rather than asking "what's the smallest step we can make in the right direction" and then executing on that repeatedly until your goal is achieved "enough."