By examining early 1920s documents from the nascent Turkish republic and its Ankara-based Grand National Assembly, we witness that one of the first regulatory concerns to emerge involved proposals to prohibit alcohol. As with contemporary prohibition politics observable in the United States, wherein particular religiously-based groups and organizations linking women’s rights with temperance oddly aligned themselves with racist and xenophobic interests, the nascent Turkish republic’s politics of drink brought together seemingly incongruent actor and groups, as well. While core interests advocating prohibition in 1920s Turkey were religionists—and their stance as Islamists on prohibition largely prefigured their later posture vis-à-vis particular secularist interests over matters like the eventual abolition of the Caliphate, their position was supported oddly by the early republic’s very secular public health establishment. Moreover, without the support of those concerned more with medicine than morality, the early parliament would not have been able to enact a brief period of prohibition in Anatolia. In this paper, I examine the medicalized discourse found in Turkey’s earliest debates regarding prohibition. This narrative not only underscores early leaders’ concerns over population and health as they sought to achieve governance, it also reveals a sociopolitical issue that has always been far more nuanced than simplistic dualisms, as depicted between Islamists and secularists. In presenting this paper, I also engage with how this history of health and alcohol better contextualizes our understandings of current protests over today’s Turkish state wherein the place of drink and drinking are again contested.