Association Against the Prohibition Amendment distilleries. There were over 500,000 members in 28 states. In order to promote its cause, the Association distributed over 1,250,000 research pamphlets, often focusing on the negative effects that Prohibition had upon the economy and how it proliferated the amount of illegal distilleries. The Association claimed in the 18 different research pamphlets it distributed that the cessation of Prohibition would help the economy, and later on stated that repealing the 18th Amendment would ultimately help the United States recover from the Great Depression. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment officially disbanded on December 5th, 1933 after the ratification of the
Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution the Constitution had ushered in a period known as Prohibition, during which the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal. Passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 was the crowning achievement of the temperance movement, but it soon proved highly unpopular. Crime rates soared under Prohibition as gangsters, such as Chicago's Al Capone, became rich from a profitable, often violent black market for alcohol. The federal government was incapable of stemming the tide: enforcement of the Volstead Act proved to be a nearly impossible task and corruption was rife among law enforcement agencies. In 1932, wealthy industrialist John