Prohibition On midnight of January 16, 1920, one of the started around the turn of the century, when many people got the idea that most of what was wrong with America was caused by boozepersonal habits and customs of most Americans came to a sudden halt. It . They saw prohibition as the silver hammer that would decimate all of their alky-related woes. Instead, it turned out to be the lodestone that lead America into thirteen years of chaos. The eighteenth amendment was ineffective because it was unenforceable, it caused an explosive growth in crime, and it increased the amount of alcohol consumption.