Last call
Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.
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- If you find this interesting, I highly recommend Last Call by Daniel Okrent:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHVHY/
Some related tidbits from that book:
Like the compressed grape bricks, grape juice was perfectly legal. And making your own wine for family consumption was also legal.
So in San Francisco, many homes had basement wine cellars, and you could arrange a delivery from the grape juice truck down a chute into your wine barrel.
If you preferred fresh grapes, you could go to the Drumm Street station to pick up boxes of Napa County grapes straight off the train. Then go next door to the barrel maker and take it all home.
http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2019/05/will-wine-coun...
- You didn't even have to buy from Al Capone.
People who could afford it built extensive wine cellars and stocked them up before Prohibition began.
The head of a household could make up to 200 gallons of wine per year for personal use and to share with family and friends. San Franciscans bought their grapes off the train that came down from Wine Country. If you didn't want the mess of crushing the grapes yourself, Golden Gate Grape & Juice Co. would crush them for you and deliver them to your home in a barrel from Pigiatura Completa Dell'Uva next door. (Scroll up and down in the first link for some photos.) [1] [2]
If you didn't have a cellar or a source of grapes, you could mail order a "grape brick" of compressed dried grapes that came with a warning label: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine." [3]
You could buy liquor for medicinal purposes with a doctor's prescription. The prescription listed the type of liquor required, how much you needed and how often to take it, and you would get the prescription filled at your local pharmacy. Walgreens grew from a few drugstores in Chicago to a nationwide chain by supplying medicinal liquor during Prohibition. [4]
Clergy could buy sacramental wine and share it with their congregation for church services and other needs. California's Sebastiani Winery, founded in 1895, survived Prohibition by supplying sacramental and medicinal wine. [5]
Daniel Okrent has written extensively on Prohibition. I highly recommend his book Last Call and related talks he's given. [6]
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=vqFxq6nv4rEC&pg=PA104-IA6&...
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Prohibition-...
[3] https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
[4] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-prohibition-yo...
- By the by, because it's really interesting, prohibition wasn't intended / wasn't understood to apply to beer and wine by the vast majority of supporters of the amendment. Some people leveraged white nationalism / anti-german racism, including the fact that many brewers were German, to pass the Volstead act which banned all alcohol. And by all alcohol I mean nothing like all alcohol -- there were many widely used loopholes, including getting a prescription from your doctor, buying grape juice with a warning to drink it within X days or it would ferment and become alcoholic, or even becoming jewish (10 gallons per person per year!). It really was a ban on some persons some of the time.
If you're interested, read Daniel Okrent _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition_
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/07...
Good thing the American public learned our lesson and never did anything stupid like that again.
- If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Last Call: Rise and Fall of the Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent. There is a PBS documentary as well, but I found it difficult to watch (narration with lots of panning over still photos).
The prohibition is a really great example of the unintended consequences of (mostly well-intentioned) morality-by-legislation.
- >The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations.
Actually, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition virtually all of the organizations devoted to booze either went legit or drastically shrank in size and scope. We would've been better off without alcohol prohibition in the first place, but ending it was certainly a net win.
If you're interested in the history and parallels of alcohol prohibition to today's drug prohibition, Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074... .
- >The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll continue to charge the current price
This is highly unlikely. It's MUCH cheaper to obey the law than not; as I said in another comment, you may notice that, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition, almost no one sold alcohol illegally because it wasn't worth it.
Daniel Okrent's book Last Call is pretty good on this subject.
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