The period from 1920-1933 in which U.S. lawmakers sought to criminaliza the purchase and consumption of alcohol is known as the prohibition period.
It started on January 16th 1920 but before that there was a sector of the society, mostly protestant people which believed that the causes of all the bad things were attached to the consumption of alcohol, during the XIX century various religious leaders had insisted on regulate it.
By the year 1850 a large mass of inmigration coming from more tolerant countries toward the consume of alcohol like Ireland and Germany arrived U.S. The protestant preachers wanted the foreigners to adopt their policy against alcohol. Next to the preachers there were also some progressive intelectuals and union leaders from a left wing that condemn the consumption as provoker of the backwardness and the poverty between the working class.
By the end of the XIX century and the beggining of the XX the foreigners had elevated the statistics of drunkenness and several wives claimed that their husbands spent all of their money in the pubs or cantines leaving nothing to their children. In 1917 the congress aprobed a resolution in favor of the XVIII amendment that prohibited the sell, importation, exportation, fabrication and transport of alcohol in all the american territory. On January of 1919 the amendment was ratificated by 36 of the 48 states, being this way possible to impose as a federal law. On october of the same year it finally came out the Volstead law named after the senator Andrew Volstead who was the man behind the making of the law.
During the prohibition period the illegal merchants adulterated or created their own industrial alcohol and made drinks out of it causing several cases of intoxication or poisoning in the consumers. Cases like this made a turn in the society feelings about the prohibition considering that the Volstead law turn out to do more bad than good and in the year 1933 the new elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison act that allowed to sold beer and wine.