America tried Prohibition once. It lasted 13 years, catapulted Al Capone to fame and infamy, killed thousands from toxic, unregulated spirits, and made criminals of ordinary citizens who simply wanted a beer. By the time the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, the country had learned a hard and expensive lesson: legislating personal pleasures doesn’t eliminate them. It just drives it underground, enriches criminals, and corrodes public trust in government. The New Prohibition has not learned the lesson of preserving liberty; they have just refined their tactics.
Those lessons, it seems, need to be relearned.
A well-funded, well-organized, and largely invisible movement is advancing a second campaign against alcohol — not through outright bans, but through a strategy of price, stigma, and policy that is arguably more sophisticated and more durable than anything the Anti-Saloon League ever attempted. They have learned from past failures and replaced the sledgehammer with a scalpel. It’s much easier to swindle someone if you don’t announce your intentions.
The New Prohibition Network
At the center of this movement is Movendi International, an organization that most beverage consumers have never heard of. That obscurity is, at least partly, by design. Movendi was founded in 1851 as the International Order of Good Templars — a secret society modeled on Freemasonry, organized around total abstinence from alcohol and drugs. At its peak after the Civil War, it had roughly 400,000 members operating through a global network of closely supervised lodges. Members were initiated through a ritual ceremony and pledged publicly to avoid alcohol and to promote that principle to others.
In 2019, the organization rebranded as Movendi International. The ritual trappings were quietly retired. The mission was not. The New Prohibition is operating in stealth mode.
Today, Movendi operates in 63 countries with 173 member organizations. It holds official partnership status with the World Health Organization (WHO). Its president, Kristina Sperkova, grew up in the organization — her father founded Slovakia’s first IOGT chapter, and her mother ran its youth activities. Her partner, Maik Dunnbier, serves as Movendi’s director of strategy and advocacy and is listed as a contributor to the WHO’s official guide for journalists on reporting on alcohol. The guide has been criticized for reading less like neutral media advice and more like a messaging manual for the position that alcohol is categorically harmful.
The question of where credible public health advocacy ends and ideological abstinence campaigning begins is not an academic one. It has direct consequences for policy, science, and ultimately, for the cost and availability of every bottle on your shelf.
The New Prohibition Playbook
The modern neo-prohibition strategy is deliberately incremental. No one is proposing the 18th Amendment. Instead, the goals are to make alcohol more expensive through taxation, harder to access through availability restrictions, and increasingly socially unacceptable through relentless stigmatization. Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and one of the most dogged researchers tracking this movement, puts it plainly: once moderate drinking is framed as categorically unsafe, the path opens to treating alcohol like cigarettes. That is precisely the model being followed.
The WHO’s 2023 declaration that there is “no safe level of alcohol consumption” is the ideological cornerstone of this approach. The WHO’s “3 by 35” initiative — backed by Movendi, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — aims to raise the real prices of alcohol, tobacco, and sugary drinks by at least 50 percent globally by 2035 through taxation, projecting $1 trillion in additional public revenue. The financial incentive for governments is not lost on critics. As Snowdon observes, there is an inherent contradiction in arguing that higher taxes will stop people from drinking while simultaneously counting on that drinking to generate a trillion dollars. You cannot have both.
The RESET Alcohol initiative, coordinated by Vital Strategies — an organization with an annual budget of approximately $120 million and deep ties to Bloomberg Philanthropies — brings together the WHO, Movendi, the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to assist governments in adopting policies designed to reduce alcohol consumption. These are not fringe organizations operating on the margins. They are embedded in the architecture of global public health policy. The New Prohibition is embedded in public policy.
The most recent gathering of this network took place in Rio de Janeiro in April 2026 — the 8th Global Alcohol Policy Conference, co-hosted with Vital Strategies and Brazil’s Ministry of Health and Ministry of Justice. Sessions were devoted to raising alcohol taxes, restricting advertising on digital platforms, and advancing government-monopoly control of retail. The conference theme positioned alcohol as a “commercial determinant of harm” — the same framing used against tobacco decades ago.
The Evidence Is Mixed — and That Matters
To be fair and accurate here, some of the policy tools being promoted are not without merit. Scotland’s minimum unit pricing, implemented in 2018, has produced genuinely positive results. An independent evaluation found it saved an estimated 156 lives and averted 411 hospital admissions per year on average. These are real people. That cannot be dismissed.
But the evidence is neither uniform nor uncontested. The same evaluation noted that inflation has significantly eroded the policy’s impact. And the broader global picture is far more complicated than the movement’s advocates acknowledge. When researchers and governments present only findings that support predetermined conclusions — as several have been credibly accused of doing — the science itself becomes compromised, and public trust erodes along with it. Bad public policy presented as science is an all-too-familiar script being played out in numerous scenarios.
Follow the Money for The New Prohibition — Including the Other Direction
Here is where the story becomes considerably more complex, and where BevX readers deserve a candid look at the full picture.
While alcohol faces a coordinated campaign of taxation, stigmatization, and advertising restriction, another intoxicant has been simultaneously elevated, normalized, and in many states, fully legalized. Cannabis — once the subject of its own prohibitionist crusade — is now a nearly $40 billion industry in the United States, with revenues expected to grow steadily as legalization spreads.
The public health framing of cannabis has been notably different. A flurry of federally funded studies has examined cannabis as a potential tool to reduce alcohol consumption, with one study finding that participants drank roughly 25 percent fewer alcoholic beverages after using cannabis, while research funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council found that Cannabidiol (CBD) represents “a promising candidate to reduce voluntary alcohol consumption.”
To be clear: cannabis has real and documented health risks of its own, including dependency, cognitive effects, and particular concerns for developing brains. This is not an anti-cannabis argument — far from it. But the asymmetry in how these two industries are being treated in the public health arena is worth examining with clear eyes. We are in the camp of full disclosure of health risks and benefits, of sound-moneyed adults being able to make their own decisions, and of healthy skepticism toward anyone who believes that their prescription for a better world is being implemented by force and control.
A study funded by the California Department of Cannabis Control found that 68 percent of cannabis regulatory agencies referenced public health goals in their mission statements, compared with just 35 percent of those overseeing alcohol — a framing that conveniently positions cannabis regulation as the more responsible model. Meanwhile, lobbying disclosures show a surge of activity from major alcohol companies, including Bacardi North America and Anheuser-Busch, around hemp Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) beverage regulation, as the two industries joust for the same consumer’s leisure dollar.
Following the money rarely produces a simple villain. What it does produce is a clearer picture of competing interests, each funding research and advocacy that serves their market position. The neo-prohibition movement is real, and its funding is documented. So is the cannabis industry’s investment in positioning itself as the responsible alternative. Consumers and policymakers deserve to understand both. It’s a near certainty that if they succeed with the abolition of alcohol, cannabis, and anything else (imagine caffeine) would then become the new boogeyman. Tyranny has no limiting principles.
What it Means for You
The “3 by 35” initiative aims to generate an additional $1 trillion in public revenue globally through alcohol taxation by 2035. That money comes from somewhere. It comes from your wallet, at the bar, at the wine shop, and at the restaurant. A $40 Friday night, quietly and incrementally, becomes a $60 Friday night — not through a single dramatic legislative moment, but through the accumulated weight of policy changes that most consumers never see coming and never voted for.
America’s first experiment with Prohibition was conducted openly. A constitutional amendment required a national debate and a democratic process. What is underway now is quieter, more sophisticated, and considerably better funded. It does not require an amendment. It requires taxes, advertising bans, warning labels, restricted hours, government retail monopolies, and a relentless message that your drink is categorically dangerous.
Those who love wine, beer, spirits, and cocktails — who see these beverages as central to culture, cuisine, community, and the legitimate pleasures of a well-lived life — have an interest in paying attention to this story. Not with paranoia. Not with conspiracy theories. But with the same clear-eyed curiosity that makes a great beverage consumer: ask where it comes from, who made it, what’s in it, and who benefits. In this case, the conspiracy is fact, and it’s in their manifesto — read it.
At BevX, we believe in informed adults, honest information, and the freedom to raise a glass without apology. That belief, it turns out, now requires defending.
The people working to eliminate your drink are organized, funded, and deadly serious. Now that you know of their intentions, what are you going to do about it?
If you would like to better understand our approach to Making Adult Beverages Part of Your Life, check out the feature.
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