[1] This philosophy has been the basis for many acts of statutory law throughout history, most notably when a large group of a given population disapproves of and/or feels threatened by an activity in which a smaller group of that population engages, and seeks to render that activity legally prohibited.
The success of a measure of prohibitionism has been criticized as often depending too much upon effective enforcement of the relevant legislation.
have argued this is because the majority of the targets of prohibitionism are in the category of victimless crime, where they claim the harm that comes from the crime is non-existent, questionable, or only to the person who performs the act and even then the magnitude of the harm being relatively small.
For example, American philosopher Noam Chomsky has criticized drug prohibition as being a technique of social control of the "so-called dangerous classes".
[2] Prohibitionism based laws have the added problem of calling attention to the behavior that they are attempting to prohibit.