It won't be cheap.

Across South, Push Is On to Make Dry Areas Wet - New York Times:

Attempts by Wal-Mart and others to allow alcohol sales in other places that remain dry — 415 counties in the South and in Kansas still prohibit such sales — are meeting fierce resistance from some church groups and religious leaders. They argue that returning to the days when liquor flowed will mean more family violence, under-age drinking, drunken driving and a general moral decay in the community.

I spent about five years traveling in the southeastern US back in the 60s and I doubt things have changed much since then, in terms of the wacky hodgepodge of liquor laws that change from county to county and sometimes, in cities like Atlanta, from block to block.

And they aren't supported just by “church groups and religious leaders,” these “dry” laws, but also by bootleggers and owners of out-of-the-way “nightclubs” and “private clubs” that stand to profit in a big way from booze's being officially hard to get. (In the “dry” city of Nashville, in Printers Alley, there was a row of “private” clubs whose conditions of membership were (1) being tall enough to reach the doorbell and (2) five bucks. And every hotel in Dallas had its own “private” club to which one automatically belonged if one rented a room. And so forth.)

Believe me, not everyone who loudly opposes selling the stuff is seriously opposed to drinking it, as long as that can be conveniently done out of sight. It's just the loudly opposing part that counts. A lot.

The people with the most to gain from all this are the politicians, who can look forward to a lot of...what are we calling it these days? oh yeah...transactional lobbying in the days to come.

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