Raise your glass: Dec. 5 was the 76th anniversary of the death of the 18th Amendment — also known as the Volstead Act, or in the parlance of historians, Prohibition.

Even if alcohol never passes your lips and you’ve never admired how beads of sweat form on the outside of a bottle of beer on a hot day, you should be able to celebrate the end of one of the greatest national mistakes America ever made.

“The first lesson is that you can’t legislate morality,” said Peter Brumlik, history professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “We’re learning that right now with the marijuana act.”

Prohibition, which plagued our land from 1920 to 1933, did not decrease drinking (see my blog) and it increased crime. Americans never really wanted it, but a shrill minority cajoled a number of politicians into approving it.

“You had an upward swing of religious fundamentalists,” Brumlik said.

Oh, yes. Spearheaded by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which began in 1874, the movement to end the evils of alcohol reached its apex in 1920, when every state but Rhode Island ratified Prohibition.

Colorado was on the cutting edge, if you want to call it that, by passing its own prohibition law in 1916. An anonymous writer complained in The New York Times that year: “This state has passed a prohibition law which is illustrative of the way we are apt to tackle a problem in this country, namely through a policy of fanaticism.”

One of Prohibition’s lessons is that we should never let religious fundamentalists take over. Afghanistan’s Taliban and the powers-that-be in Iran are current examples of what can happen when the church runs the state.

The Christian fundamentalists who worked hard to bring us Prohibition also helped catalyze organized crime, which earned a lot of working capital during the Roaring 20s.

“It diverted organized crime from prostitution to alcohol,” Brumlik said.

True, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa just opened up a new detox facility. But we would have detox facilities regardless of whether alcoholic beverages are legal or not. Prohibition clearly showed us that much.

Other than lessons learned, did any good come from Prohibition?

“NASCAR had its genesis, so there are some good things,” Brumlik said with a chuckle.

Even with NASCAR, whose first drivers worked for bootleggers, one is forced to observe that the cars just go around in circles, right?

As songwriter Clayton McMichen wrote years ago in “Prohibition Has Done Me Wrong:”

“Prohibition has killed more folks than Sherman ever seen.

“If they can’t get drunk they’ll take to dope — cocaine and morphine.”

So raise a glass to acknowledge how wet we’ve been these last 76 years.

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