I like to joke that if I could go anywhere in history, I would go to a speakeasy during Prohibition—despite the fact that I dislike both alcohol and large groups of people. Really, I’d be mostly in it for the jazz, the unique historical perspective, and the feeling of getting away with something.

Prohibition is a fascinating event in US history, no matter which way you choose to study it. It comes up in relation to the Constitution, as having been both established and repealed by constitutional amendment (established by the only amendment ever repealed, the Eighteenth). It’s closely tied to first-wave feminism, given that the anti-alcohol temperance movement maintained such a vast overlap with the suffragette movement that at one point the spokeswoman of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union declared that the Nineteenth Amendment would ensure the Eighteenth remain in force eternally.

Perhaps the most relevant way to look at the time, though, is that Prohibition was really one of America’s first major drug laws. And like many of the major drug laws that have sprung up in this country over the years, there was a not-insignificant amount of nationalism and xenophobia behind it.

The Temperance movement had been around since the early 19th century—Maine, in fact, would be the first state to pass laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol in 1851. And also the first state to repeal them, in 1856. The movement went into full force around the 1880s—right around the time the US was receiving record numbers of immigrants.

Alcohol was associated with religious minorities—with wine used in Catholic and Jewish ceremonies—and ethnic ones, particularly the Irish and Germans. The Germans in particular were enormously invested in the alcohol industry, cornering the market on the brewing of beer, and maintained a solid barrier against Temperance lobbyists through the weight taxes on alcohol brought to the national treasury. It was no coincidence that the hammer fell on the industry immediately after World War One encouraged most of the nation to view Germans as a collective enemy—in fact, some of the temperance movement’s most effective campaigning relied on it.

While the German brewers captained industry, in the ethnic enclaves of the inner cities, more humble saloons served as not only places for recent immigrant arrivals to find a quick drink or a meal but somewhere to collect mail, find work, and generally connect and socialize. The support network of many immigrants was their local saloon. Rather tellingly, one of the more prominent temperance groups was specifically the Anti-Saloon League.

Another group, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union mentioned above, would perhaps have been more accurately labeled the Women’s Protestant Temperance Union. Catholics were not a popular group in the early 20th century. Only four years after the passing of the 18th amendment, the KKK would conduct an anti-Catholic march down Main Street in Saco and be turned back at the bridge to Biddeford by French-Canadian immigrants.

Prohibition was always explicitly meant to dispel “unsavory elements,” and the tone of the Temperance movement left no doubt as to what those unsavory elements were. Frances Willard, leader of the WCTU for many years, once urged Congress to restrict immigration in order to prevent “the scum of the Old World” from entering. Which they did, creating an Emergency Quota Act that went into effect in 1921 and was further strengthened in 1924, slowing what had been a flood of new arrivals down to a trickle. The interesting thing is that neither act set limits on immigration from Latin America.

Or perhaps the interesting thing is that almost 20 years after Prohibition was repealed, the Immigration and Nationality Act that did set restrictions on immigration from Latin America was passed the same year as the Boggs Act—which established, for the first time, mandatory sentencing and increased punishment for possession of marijuana.

To run the risk of repeating myself—viewing Prohibition as America’s first major drug law might be the most relevant lens with which to examine it. History doesn’t repeat, but it most definitely rhymes.

Considering current conditions, it’s worth mentioning that historians looking at data from Prohibition have concluded that liquor consumption neither reduced or increased significantly during Prohibition, and certainly did not increase significantly after repeal. What all can agree did increase, and in fact flourished during Prohibition, were illegal and violent activities related to and enabled by the black-market liquor trade.

Nationalism and xenophobia were not the only factors behind Prohibition, of course, but they were significant. Drug laws are very rarely about the drugs alone. The thing to consider, always, is less the classic “cui bono”—who benefits—than who does not.