What I find amusing is that the amount of bars increased during prohibition as did violence. The thing the law was trying to curb. The article states that 1n 1927, during prohibition there were over 30k bars, twice the number before prohibition, the taxpayers were spending 100’s of millions annually enforcing the liquor laws instead of collecting millions in taxes towards social programs and city services. I guess prohibition goes into the same pile of BS as every other law that tries to impose a small groups moral and social standards onto the masses, they figure out it’s a bit hard to enforce. Since the large breweries were forced to close, ordinary people made bank on home brew and moonshine… unfortunately bathtub brew, if messed up can cause side effects other than drunkenness or a risk of DUI. There were many cases of people going blind, paralysis and death due to home made liquor recipes.

Enforcement of 1920s’ Prohibition was a formidable task. Bootleggers and rum runners were plentiful. Criminal elements organized because of the large profits in bootlegging. Much of the population had contempt for law enforcement during 1920s’ Prohibition. Chicago’s Al Capone and his organization were considered glamorous figures; supposedly, half the city’s police were on their payroll.

The social reform movement that led to prohibition created more social problems than before. Police corruption, murder, bribery, street gangs and organized crime all flourished in new found profits and doubled the amount of now illegal bars than there was before legally. Corruption was one of the things proponents claimed prohibition would abolish…hmmm.

The first half of the 20th century saw periods of prohibition of alcoholic beverages in several countries, The US, the most famous for liquor and prohibition was not the only country practicing the liquor law.

• 1900 to 1948 in Prince Edward Island, and for shorter periods in other locations in Canada
• 1914 to 1925 in Russia and the Soviet Union
• 1915 to 1922 in Iceland (though beer was still prohibited until 1989)
• 1916 to 1927 in Norway (wine and beer also included in 1917)
• 1919 in Hungary (in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, March 21 to August 1; called szesztilalom)
• 1919 to 1932 in Finland (called kieltolaki)
• 1920 to 1933 in the United States

Digitalhistory - liquor law -At midnight, January 16, 1920, the United States went dry; breweries, distilleries, and saloons were forced to close their doors.

Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohol’s link to wife beating and child abuse and industrialists, such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity. Advocates of Prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, end machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants.

Even before the 18th Amendment was ratified, about 65 percent of the country had already banned alcohol. In 1916, seven states adopted anti-liquor laws, bringing the number of states to 19 that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. America’s entry into World War I made Prohibition seem patriotic since many breweries were owned by German Americans. Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the Anti-Saloon League, urged the federal government to investigate “a number of breweries around the country which are owned in part by alien enemies.” In December 1917, Congress passed the 18th Amendment. A month later, President Woodrow Wilson instituted partial prohibition to conserve grain for the war effort. Beer was limited to 2.75 percent alcohol content and production was held to 70 percent of the previous year’s production. In September, the president issued a ban on the wartime production of beer.

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I found this post on a real estate blog called blue roof… go figure, it’s great though. Go Blue Roof. Looking for Utah real estate? check em out.

The LDS fanatics state legislature has decided to “simplify” the incredibly ridiculous Utah state liquor laws again. Will this stupid and absurd “musical chairs” of liquor law rule-swapping ever stop?

Under the new rules, the limit to how much alcohol that can be poured into a drink has been increased from 1 once to 1.5 ounces. That’s the only sane part.

But, now you can no longer order a “sidecar”, or an additional shot of that alcohol that we locals have been forced to order so we can “spike” our drinks and give them a normal ratio of alcohol.

You can have a shot of liquor in front of you with a drink, but now you can not have a shot of the same type of alcohol that is in your drink. So, if you are drinking a Margarita you can have a shot of vodka or rum or bourbon, but not a shot of tequila.

Smart…

Now, I’ll just order two shots of Jack Daniels and a regular coke and pour both shots into my coke. These are the stupid things we adults need to do in Utah to have a normal drink.

Also, wine coolers and flavored malt beverages will only be sold in state liquor stores, so now that $6 six-pack of wine cooler (which are just as weak as beer) will cost you $9 with the state liquor store mark-up of over 40%.

The reasoning is that if kids see fruity drinks in the grocery store they will;

A) Steal the drinks (meaning kids here are all thief’s)

or they will

B) Simply want to drink because they see these tempting fruity drinks. Because that’s why kids drink alcolhol, right? For the fruity taste! I mean, they can’t get fruity drinks anywhere else, right?

So now, thanks to our intellectually-challenged state legislature, kids will not be drinking anymore in Utah because they won’t see fruity drinks at Albertsons…

And, of course, you still cannot ship wine into or out of the state and beer is 3.2% alcohol unlike every other state, where it’s 6%, because our lawmakers get a kick out of changing laws and rules about things they know nothing about (which is most everything).

Here is my solution;

Why not let adults drink whatever kind of alcohol they want, and let bars make the drinks the way they want, like in  other states, and then punish alcohol-related crimes much more severely? Isn’t that supposed to be the whole goal, to get rid of the bad things that can happen when people are drinking?

Here’s the ironic part of the whole thing- telling me I can’t have a shot of tequila on the table at the same time as my margarita does not make me drink less tequila, it makes me drink more. When the waitress gets to my table with my shot, I have to “chug” my margarita so I can then have my shot. And then I have to order another margarita

because I just chugged mine. Most people don’t drink shots, they drink mixed drinks or beer and they order a round of shots that sit on the table until everyone takes the shot together.

In Utah, we have to do shots of our mixed drinks and beers so that we can do shots of liquor. Our legislature is so smart…

Every state in the US probably has a few silly beer laws that make little sense to most people. Many of them are outdated or brought about by giant companies like Budweiser or religious reasons… No beer or wine on Christmas in Michigan? I Michigan politicians feel Jesus preferred apple cider to red wine on his birthdays. It really does upsets me when politicians feel that THEIR holidays should be observed in THEIR way, especially, when its a religious holiday…. remember, America is all about Freedom of Religion.. right? Well if its the case, why is drinking a glass of wine on Christmas a criminal offense if you are not even a Christian? hmmm… Well if it wasn’t for hypocrites, we would have no politicians at all.. bust people on ethics violations in the morning and bang hookers at night. Seems about right, hey back to silly beer laws.

Michigan has repealed most of its silly laws, but every Yuletide it turns into a Grinch. It’s against the law to serve alcohol on Christmas Day, even in restaurants serving holiday buffets. And silliness persists at the local level.

Anyway, here is a small summary of some US beer laws that some micro brewers and beer lovers have issues with.

Ask the members of Georgians for World Class Beer. They’ve been lobbying state legislators to repeal a 1935 law prohibiting the sale of beer having more than six percent alcohol. This archaic definition of “beer” keeps Belgian dubbels and tripels, German doppelbocks, and American barleywines off the store shelves.

A bill that would have repealed the six-percent limit was defeated once again last year. Opponents of repeal carried the day with the age-old argument: extra-strength beers would end up in the hands of teenagers looking for a quick buzz. Never mind that a high-schooler’s beer of choice is more likely to be Molson Ice than Paulaner Salvator.

Georgia’s strong-beer prohibition is nothing compared to Utah’s 3.2-percent limit on draft beer, which earned the state worldwide notoriety during the Winter Olympics. If you’ve had a pint of bitter in a British pub or a mug of Czech lager in a Prague beer hall, you know it’s possible to brew great beer with a relatively low alcohol content. But that isn’t the point: Utah’s 3.2 law prevents that state’s craft brewers from turning out a wide range of styles.

Until recently, florida-stupid-laws/" title="silly and dumb laws florida state">Florida, the state that invented Spring Break, had one of the nation’s silliest beer laws. Passed in 1965, it required containers to be one of four sizes: eight, 12, 24, or 32 ounces. The law, a by-product of a long-forgotten spat between Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing, posed no problem for the brewing giants. But craft brewers that preferred 22-ounce “bombers,” and European brewers using metric-sized bottles, were out of luck.

Lawmakers not only dictate what beers you can drink, but where and when you can buy them. Many states ban the sale of beer in grocery stores. Oklahoma goes one step further, forcing its citizens to go to state liquor stores to buy beer stronger than 3.2 percent. In Connecticut, beer can’t be sold after 8 pm, bringing to mind Yogi Berra’s line, “It gets late out early.” And Sunday remains a hit-or-miss proposition for traveling beer lovers; archaic blue laws ban package sales, and, in some states, force bars to close.