The Daily Beast:
“Dry counties” exist as a sort feral anachronism—like phone booths and video stores. They appeared in response to perceived social or economic need, and when those needs dissipated, they were left behind, like flotsam from a flood nobody remembers. We are a nation that’s pretty good at building laws, and pretty lousy at dismantling them.
And so dry counties persist—today an estimated 18 million people are unable to buy a legal drink where they live. Mostly these persist in the south, and a map of dry counties overlaid with one of the Bible Belt, not surprisingly, shows considerable overlap. (Although the penchant for dryness fades as you get closer to the Gulf of Mexico.) The states with the most dry counties are Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. Fact: you can still get arrested for possession of alcohol in some dry counties, as a 69-year-old man in Culliman, Alabama, learned recently.
This is such a weird and wonderful quirk of US liquor laws. I still remember my first visit to the Jack Daniels Distillery in Lynchburg and saying, “let’s go to the pub afterward!” and being incredibly disappointed by the response.
This foolishness predates Prohibition to a degree. “Gentleman’s” clubs masquerading as moralistic, community-controlling churches have existed in the U.S. since almost the beginning of colonization. The early colonies were likely full of small towns where you couldn’t do any business if the local mandarins didn’t see you in their church every week.
I grew up in a dry county, and I will tell you it is foolishness. It was much easier to drink underage than in the ‘wet’ counties nearby. The bootleggers running booze in a dry county don’t care about how old you are. The local bootlegger would sell to kids as young as 13 or 14. ‘Dry’ counties are worse in every measure – more underage drinking, less tax revenue.
They all exist in the southern United States where the dumbest incest-filled bible thumpers and trump lovers eagerly await their their rocket ride into heaven.
Seems like generations of incest DO catch up with you.
“This is such a weird and wonderful quirk of US liquor laws.”
Not WONDERFUL, at all.
Every state is weird in its own way.
“land of the free”
LOL, I’ve been to the JD distillery as well. The liquor laws around the country are bizarre.
I remember riding through Arkansas and booked a room in a dry county by mistake. Went to the convenience store where you could buy a switchblade knife and a slim-jim (for breaking into cars) but you could not buy a beer. Oh, and right off the freeway off ramp they had the biggest porn store I’ve ever seen. Priorities right?
Where my family lives in Tennessee you can only buy liquor and wine from a “liquor” store. And then not on Sunday. So stock up on Saturday! The owner of the store told me the liquor store law was mostly to protect the business from chain grocery stores. Who knows.
In Utah the state owns all the liquor stores and they only sell alcohol warm. Cold beer is dangerous man. And then the beer has a 3.2% alcohol limit, but only bottled beer. You can go to a bar and get full strength.
Pretty interesting.
Exactly. There’s nothing wonderful about blue laws here.