Alcohol

General and Limited Prohibition of Consumption

The simplest regulatory regime regarding alcoholic drinks is that of general prohibition. This has rarely been used. In the U.S. context, the general prohibition imposed in 1919, with its attendant bootlegging and gangsterism, became a symbol of the limits of the law itself. However, this strategy is currently undergoing a revival, and even some enforcement success, in countries with a strict interpretation of Muslim law.

A much more popular strategy is that of targeted prohibition. In North America, the earliest and most sustained form of targeted prohibition was making the sale of alcohol to indigenous people illegal, a paternalistic move supplemented in Canada by laws aimed at Indians' own consumption. For many decades, Canadian whites had to be disorderly as well as drunk to be subject to arrest, but the police could arrest Indians who were merely drunk, even in their own home. In 1969, the Supreme Court of Canada finally threw out this discriminatory provision, but being drunk on an Indian reserve remained an offense until well into the 1980s. Since the key point of contention in many of these prosecutions was whether the buyer in question was or was not an Indian, these cases are a rich and little-mined source for sociolegal historians. Generally, liquor laws importantly helped shape cultural as well as legal definitions of Indianness, in the United States as well as in Canada.

Today, the most important kind of targeted prohibition is that which is age specific. In Europe the usual “drinking age” is sixteen, with some jurisdictions (England and Wales, for example) drawing distinctions between youths drinking with their parents and those drinking on their own. In the United States, by contrast, the drinking age has been raised in recent years in many states to as high as twenty-one, a legal change in sharp conflict with changes to lower age rules governing voting and military service. Traffic [Page 55]accidents are generally cited as the reason for this unusual ban on consumption, but there has been no public discussion of the possibility of raising the driving age instead, which suggests that there is still a lingering moral concern about drinking itself, not only about associated risks.

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