I suggest you can't really have a useful understanding of political questions in the abstract. When you look into the history of these policy decisions, there's always something more going on than a purely reasoned universal morality.

Take your example of Prohibition. The Temperance Movement was around for a long time before it formed a political party and started gaining traction. Why? Was there any connection between the massive social upheavals that were changing the society in the U.S. at the turn of the century that might have put wind in the sails of this party? Prohibition was "progressive" politics but does that word "progressive" still mean what it meant then? No. You can't have a Progressive party without some sense of "progressing towards what?". In that case, you were talking about the WASP ruling class that had very long-held ideas about what progress meant, dating back to before the founding of the country by English Dissenters. Of course, the advent of WWI had the normal accompanying propaganda campaign. Prohibition benefited from wider anti-German sentiment (anti-beer) and war-time grain conservation efforts.

But, arguably a bigger reason for Prohibition's policy achievements were widespread anxiety about urbanization and "saloon" culture in the cities, which was widely and accurately associated with immigrants and african americans. In a sense, you can see Prohibition as a last-gasp attempt to control the social forces changing America at that time and restore "law and order". The fact that it gave rise to organized criminal gangs (mostly run by the very people they were trying to restrain) was an unintended consequence. We see a similar thing at work with the War on Drugs.

I would argue, the reason these Prohibition-type campaigns against vice fail is because they treat the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is a culture that is dissipated and lacks moral cohesion. Arguing about "moral universalisms" like libertarianism proposes is just more of the same. All honest morality is particular, just like all rights are particular. There has never been and never will be a universal morality without turning the world into one homogeneous goo. So long as there are different peoples, there will difference conceptions of the good. The sort of pro/con argumentation is a distraction from reality, imho.