Tag: alcohol

Chris Christie Allows New Jerseyans to Quaff Better Wine

By
Ilya Shapiro

While perhaps more identified with eating than drinking, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie – who headlined Cato’s recent Milton Friedman Prize Dinner – signed a law in January that allowed out-of-state winemakers to sell directly to in-state consumers and retailers.  This wasn’t a spontaneous bit of New Year’s bonhomie – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit had ruled in Freeman v. Corzine that the previous rules benefiting in-state wineries was unconstitutional (that pesky Commerce Clause again) – but still it was a positive sign: even Wine Spectator took note.

More importantly, the district judge in charge of the nine-year lawsuit challenging that earlier law recently approved the consent decree whereby New Jersey’s new law remedied the claims brought by the out-of-state wineries.  The agreement creates an out-of-state plenary winery license (good luck saying that after having consumed too much of the the vintage) under which “foreign” wine can compete on an equal playing field with good ol’ New Jersey stock.  Specifically, the new law grants this license to out-of-state applicants, including those who sell their wares over the internet, who do not produce more than 250,000 gallons of wine per year and are duly licensed in another state.

The upshot is that the new law takes effect as of this month.

This all still seems like a bit too much regulation to me, but at least everyone is now subject to the same rules.  I may have to take advantage of this newfound freedom when I travel up to the Garden State for my college reunion in a few weeks.

For my previous writings on booze and the Commerce Clause, read this and listen to this.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

Drinking Away Your Constitutional Problems

By
Ilya Shapiro

Santa Clara law professor Brad Joondeph, who runs the very helpful – as a primary document aggregator for all the Obamacare cases –  ACA Litigation Blog, thinks he’s stumbled onto something :

So after reading my roughly 500th ACA-litigation-related brief, motion, or filing of some sort, I think I have gotten a little punchy. But it occurs to me that a a great new drinking game for those ACA litigation buffs who sit around on Friday nights drinking beers – a huge cohort, I am sure – would be to read aloud briefs filed by the challengers, and take turns drinking when the word “unprecedented” is used.

Indeed, the argument that there is no Supreme Court precedent sanctioning the assertion of power the government claims  – that the individual mandate is, quite literally, unprecedented – goes back to the earliest articulated constitutional arguments against Obamacare, particularly by the “intellectual godfather” of the legal challenges.  I can tell you that Cato’s latest Obamacare brief, which we’ll be filing in the Eleventh Circuit – the Florida-led 26-state case – next week, uses the word three times.  (We also use “novel.”)

The drinking game that Joondeph proposes, however, is not, um, unprecedented.  Josh Blackman has been talking about it incessantly at least since our time writing about the Privileges or Immunities Clause.  He even blogged about it last August! 

I would suggest that Brad and Josh play the “unprecedented” drinking game to settle the score once and for all, but alas Josh doesn’t drink.  Maybe I should step in for him; if I can bet Yale law professor Akhil Amar $100 on the outcome of the litigation, I can certainly do this.

For other connections between booze and the Commerce Clause, see my recent post on the (unfortunately not unprecedented) Care Act.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

On the Interstate Shipment of Green Beer

By
Ilya Shapiro

Today being St. Patrick’s Day, it seems appropriate to revisit the unlikely juxtaposition of two of my favorite legal policy topics: alcohol and the Commerce Clause.  (Listen to my podcast on the subject or read its transcript.)  The point of all this is that alcohol is no different from any other commodity in that states cannot erect arbitrary regulations that privilege in-state interests (be they retailers, wholesalers, or producers) ahead of their out-of-state counterparts.

But St. Paddy’s Day is not the only reason the issue is topical.  Last week, the Supreme Court declined to review the Fifth Circuit’s indefensible decision in Wine Country Gift Baskets.com v. Steen. It did so despite the Fifth Circuit’s upholding of a Texas law designed to protect Texas’s in-state liquor retailers from out-of-state competition, a holding that disregarded recent high-court precedent.

In Granholm v. Heald (2005), decided together with the Institute for Justice’s Swedenberg v. Kelly, the Supreme Court struck down a similar protectionist law. Both cases challenged laws that permitted in-state wine producers to sell directly to consumers while prohibiting similar sales from out-of-state producers. The Court held that, notwithstanding a provision in the 21st Amendment (which repealed prohibition) that allows states to regulate their own liquor industries, the Commerce Clause prohibits states from disrupting free trade by discriminating against out-of-state businesses in favor of in-state businesses. This interpretation of the Commerce Clause grew out of the common-sense understanding that, if left unchecked, state governments have strong incentives to protect in-state businesses (who are voters) at the expense of their (non-voting) out-of-state competitors. Without constitutional checks, such laws could eviscerate Congress’s constitutionally enumerated power to “regulate [make regular] commerce … among the several States.”  

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit decided to limit Granholm to wine producers. As is evident by the name, however, the Wine Country Gift Baskets.com case concerns a wine retailer. Yet Granholm explicitly said that states “may not enact laws that burden out-of-state producers or shippers simply to give a competitive advantage to in-state businesses.” It is dismaying that the Supreme Court didn’t care about the Fifth Circuit’s neglect of this language.

Granholm was an important blow against the heavily protectionist and cartelized liquor industry. As was documented in a pre-Granholm article in Cato’s Regulation magazine, the prohibition on direct shipment has been used to strangle small wineries as they struggle to access larger markets without having to go through the state-controlled distribution networks. Despite an explosion of wine-drinking and -making in this country in the last 30 years – with consumption increasing by nearly 50% between 1991-2001 and wineries quadrupling between 1974-2002 – the small winery still fights against an old-boy network of producers and distributors. In 2003, the top 30 wine companies still provided 90% of U.S. wine although they were less than 1% of the producers.

This is, of course, exactly how the top 30 wine companies want it.

Granholm dismantled some of this network. Unfortunately, Wine Country Gift Baskets.com will allow this unconstitutional infringement of the right to earn an honest living (see Timothy Sandefur’s excellent book of the same name) to persist in some states.

But Americans, like most of the world, appreciate their booze. During prohibition, Americans endured Tommy-guns, corruption, gangsters, and speakeasies just for a drink. If the government made it illegal to drink responsibly, many Americans were willing to thwart the law and drink irresponsibly.

The negative effects of prohibition were too visible to deny and, after 13 years of waging war on a non-compliant population, prohibition ended. In its wake, however, prohibition left another war, an 80-year “on-going, low-level trade war” (in the words of Granholm) between states and their three-tiered monopolies over the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol. And so, 21st Amendment or not, prohibition lives on – though the  colorful characters in spats carrying Tommy-guns have been replaced by iPad-wielding lobbyists and politicians who do their bidding.

Thanks to Trevor Burrus for his help with this blog post.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

DWI Convictions Due to Faulty Breathalyzer Calibration

By
David Rittgers

From the Washington Post:

Nearly 400 people were convicted of driving while intoxicated in the District since fall 2008 based on inaccurate results from breath test machines, and half of them went to jail, city officials said Wednesday.

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said the machines were improperly adjusted by city police. The jailed defendants generally served at least five days, he said…

The District’s badly calibrated equipment would show a driver’s blood-alcohol content to be about 20 percent higher than it actually was, Nickles said. All 10 of the breath test machines used by District police were wrong, he said. The problem occurred when the officer in charge of maintaining the machines improperly set the baseline alcohol concentration levels, Nickles said.

This is the same jurisdiction where a woman who had a single glass of wine with dinner and a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of .03 was arrested for being under the influence in 2005. The national standard for a DWI arrest is .08, and anyone testing below .05 is presumed not to be intoxicated. The District of Columbia’s standard for arrest was anything above .01 if the officer deemed the driver intoxicated. Public outcry over the strict policy, particularly in a town built on tourism, prompted the D.C. Council to temporarily amend the law. The D.C. Police website still says that police can charge DUI (Driving Under the Influence, not Driving While Intoxicated) for a BAC of .07 or lower.

There is good reason to question the foundation of DWI laws and enforcement. Radley Balko makes the case that the federal push for reducing the national DWI BAC standard from .10 to .08 achieved little for public safety in Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking. Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) founder Candy Lightner regrets the no-tolerance direction her organization has taken: “[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned… I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Why Is Marijuana Still Illegal?

By
Doug Bandow

According to Rasmussen Reports, a majority of Americans believe that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana:

Pot or not, that is the question.

Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.

But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.

Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of women say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, compared to 48% of men. Men by a two-to-one margin over women say pot is riskier, but women are more inclined to say both are dangerous.

Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.

So why are pot users still being tossed into jail?

There are lots of good reasons why people shouldn’t use drugs.  But making drug use illegal only compounds the social consequences, turning a moral and health problem into a legal and criminal problem.  The result is the worst of both worlds:  all of the problems of drug use plus all of the problems of prohibition.  Unfortunately, those consequences flow overseas, further undermining fragile societies such as Afghanistan, Colombia, and Mexico and ultimately American security objectives as well.

It’s time to call off the Drug War.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Cleveland Park Embraces Free Markets

By
John Samples

Cleveland Park, an upscale neighborhood here in the District of Columbia, might be the last place you would expect appeals to the principles of the free market.  It is, after all, the home of what David Brooks once called ”Ward Three Morality,” an outlook that celebrates government control of the economy. But not always.

Recently an entrepreneur proposed opening a new wine store in Cleveland Park. He sought the support of the advisory neighborhood commission, a local government board, before making his case for a liquor license to DC’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board.  The most serious opposition to the entrepreneur’s plans seems to have come from an existing wine store nearby. According to its attorney, the existing wine store was “a beloved extension of the community.” More candidly he noted the new store would offer competition to the existing business. At this point, you might think: the Cleveland Park commission blocked opening of the new business while congratulating themselves on protecting the town from a ruthless “capitalist logic.”

Well, not quite. Peter Fonseca, the lawyer for the entrepreneur, reportedly “urged the commissioners to consider free-market principles when making their decision. ‘This is America.’” And they did: “Commissioner Richard Rothblum agreed, saying commissioners should not get in the way of free enterprise. ‘I don’t think we have any place telling people what their business plan should be.’” The commission then voted 8-0 to support the entrepreneur’s effort at the Alcohol Control Board. The appeal to “free market principles” seems to have carried the day in Cleveland Park!

Perhaps this is only the beginning. If the free market is desirable for fine wines, why not the auto industry and the banks?

Topics: 
Regulatory Studies

Fight Moral Panics — With Beer!

By
Jason Kuznicki

In the UK and here at home, brewers have increasingly been producing specialty beers with the alcohol content of wine. Naturally, it’s time for a moral panic:

The new breed of bitters, with their intense flavours and alcohol contents of up to 12 per cent, are the work of young brewing entrepreneurs trying capture the attention — and cash — of lager-guzzling twentysomethings.

Beer writers and aficionados have welcomed the speciality bottles, which can contain 10 times as much hops as a traditional pint, as a necessary revitalisation of a market dominated by corporate giants turning out similar 4 per cent brown bitters.

But alcohol campaigners have complained that drinkers may be unaware of the strength of the new products, a single 330ml bottle of which is enough to make an adult exceed their daily recommended alcohol intake.

In January the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, ruled the brashest exponent of the movement, BrewDog brewery in Aberdeen, had broken its code on responsible marketing for its Speed Ball beer, named after the cocktail of cocaine and heroin which killed the actor John Belushi, star of The Blues Brothers.

Despite the group rejecting complaints against three of BrewDog’s other beers, Punk IPA, Rip Tide and Hop Rocker, its managing director, James Watt, accused Portman of being “outdated” and “out of touch”. He did, however, concede that his company had been provocative. “We thought we would give them something worth banning us for,” he said.

Good for them.

Note the comically low, and comically named, “recommended daily alcohol intake,” which would apparently forbid splitting a standard bottle of wine with another drinker. (Is there any better way to drink wine?) Incidentally, today’s 750 mL bottle derives from the “fifth,” or fifth of a gallon, which in the good old barrel-chested days of yore may well have been a single-serving portion.

It’s fascinating how the narrative of moral panic just keeps getting recycled, as if journalists only ever had this one idea in their heads. Is it their fault, or is it the watchdog groups? A question worth asking.

Either way, it works like this: Someone does something faux-provocative, often as a marketing stunt (to beer connoisseurs, brews with 12% alcohol are a fine old tradition, not a terrible new menace). But a group of Very Concerned People takes it all quite seriously and issues a worried press release. An interview is set up. The young are always invoked, as are previous moral panics. Anxious stories are written. Entirely fake concerns arise. (Hops, for example, don’t intoxicate, and strong hop flavors incline one to drink less beer, not more.)

If a moral panic keeps up for long enough, the legislators will get called in, because it’s their job to protect us naive ordinary folk from the dangers of the world. Maybe something will be done about it, or maybe not. Either way, the average member of the public goes away worried, which is just what the Very Concerned People want. They feed on worry.

They hope for a perpetual climate of worry, a feeling of unease that will carry over from this issue to the next one and to the one after that. It makes what they do — taking away freedoms — that much easier. It’s our job, as freedom-loving citizens, to deny them this perpetual undercurrent of worry. And if we can do it while drinking beer, then so much the better.

Topics: 
Political Philosophy, Regulatory Studies