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People don't propose banning alcohol because a previous attempt to ban alcohol led to failure. The problem is that some people are extrapolating a single attempt to ban alcohol into some general law about how prohibition will always be doomed to failure. An easy counterexample is when the PRC banned opium. During the Century of Humiliation, huge swaths of the population were addicted to opium, so when the CPC seized power and proclaimed the People's Republic of China, they banned opium because they saw opium as a social vice wrought by Western imperialists. And when opium was banned, the percentage of the population that were addicted to opium plummeted to the point where opium addiction ceased to be a social vice.
We have yet another example in a giant pile of examples of something leading to failure when the USians did it but leading to success when the Chinese did it. This is "China good US bad" trumping "prohibition will never work." Instead of clinging on the false idea that prohibition never works, we ought to analyze why the CPC was successful in eradicating opium addiction while the US failed in its attempt at banning alcohol.
I do think that the substances have important differences on top of the competency gap between countries.
One of these is made from one plant, often imported. The other can be made by anyone with a waterproof container and literally any plant.
The one that's easier to make is also ingrained in society as a way to form bonds with ones fellows by letting your guard down in a social environment, while the other basically removed you from society so the number and type of person who's going to resist the prohibition is very different.
Yes, there's that aspect as well. Alcohol is just a byproduct of a biological process. Banning alcohol is on par with banning plants or banning compost. Likewise, banning marijuana is a fool's errant because cannabis is a hardy plant that's easy to grow. It's like trying to ban an invasive species. Once you move to stuff like cocaine or heroin, it becomes easier to target them because they are synthetic products that have chemical precursors. You don't even have to ban the actual drug but instead target the precursors required to manufacture the drug. This would be ideal because it targets drug production instead of personal use.