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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The state I grew up in prohibited distilled spirits from being sold at non-State run stores.

Oregon is that way.

Groceries stores can only sell beer, wine, and malts. If you want vodka, schnapps, and other hard liquors, you gotta go to a dedicated state-run liquor store.

Most of them are pretty small, too, so if you want something uncommon, it can be hard to find. Luckily the OLCC runs a website where you can search for specific items and it will tell you which stores (if any) carry it.

I do wish we could just get a BevMo though.

Which is a methanol related health and safety measure grandfathered in as a holdover from the Volstead Act. All first world control have significant hazard analysis and supply chain integrity measures for food and drink.

Tangential—methanol poisoning from an improper brewing or distilling process is largely, maybe completely, a myth. Where toxicity events have occurred they are almost always deliberate or accidental adulteration, e.g. fortifying moonshine with industrially "denatured" (deliberately poisoned) alcohol. There has been a lot of sloppy journalism in such cases that doesn't question the myth, as well as Prohibition-era propaganda that lives on to this day.

Great Reddit discussion about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/9p1fwe/methanol_...

TIL. That said, I hadn't anticipated much rational in Prohibition rationale. The thread did support my suspicion that grappa hangovers are their own special category of hell though!

I'm not sure that's the entirely the case, given that, when I was a kid, you couldn't buy non-distilled beverages at the grocery store either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

Temperance related measures post-Volstead - an insidious loophole to appease the Bible Belt whereby liquour is specifically exempted from the federal oversight of interstate commerce.

I believe there's some relation between this and federal highway funding being tied to a minimum drinking age of 21, but I may be misremembering some half-read magazine article.

I believe it’s drinking age and breath limit thresholds thanks to MADD.

Most Nordic countries also have a state monopoly on alcohol, and these are as first-world as it gets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinmonopolet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAsdrekkas%C3%B8la_Land...

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