Prohibition Statistics

Question

I`d like to ask for your ideas please on a request we have received for historic statistical information. Has anyone researched this subject or know of any useful starting points that you could help us with?

This is for an undergraduate history paper, so of course it is a rush. The student has requested "numbers that were results of prohibition. When I say criminal charges I mean in all forms from murder, violence, bootlegging, possession and trafficking. And for numbers in death I am referring to the deaths that were due to organized crime and alcohol
poisoning (naturally due to deadly alcohol)".

Without having researched this before, I think the student is looking statistics which I think are fairly unfindable without some pretty big interpretation of historic crime and cause of death statistics around prohibition times (which is a "patchwork", longest in PEI at the turn of the century, and varying by municipality, and then later mandatory in Alberta and Ontario from 1916 to the mid 1920's and never made mandatory by the federal government).

Any ideas would be gratefully appreciated :).

Answer

As mentioned off-list, the Canada Year Book Historical Collection may contain some interesting prohibition-related facts (http://www65.statcan.gc.ca/acyb_r000-eng.htm; http://www65.statcan.gc.ca/acyb_r002-eng.htm).

The student may also wish to try searching periodical indexes, newspaper indexes and books on the topic to locate relevant statistics.