Obivously they didn't have megacorps back in the day, but developed, institutional betting has been around since Rome where it was commonplace for pretty much everyone to do it at arenas.

I looked more into moonshine and distillation, and I actually think the more dangerous part of it is the equipment itself rather than the methanol in foreshots. I'm still skeptical that more people would have alcohol-based negative health outcomes in a prohibition scenario compared to the current one. Apparently death and illness from alcohol dropped pretty significantly during prohibition.

That makes sense about the dogfighting, I really don't know much about it but was curious regardless.