To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created an Inedible Sandwich | Hacker News Reader

To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created an Inedible Sandwich

atlasobscura.com

91 pointscamtarn40 comments

In Oregon bars that serve liquor have to serve food as well. Some of the regulations:

“Substantial food item” means food items prepared or cooked on the licensed premises and that are typically served as a main course or entrée. Some examples are: fish; steak; chicken; pasta; pizza; sandwiches; dinner salads; hot dogs; soup; and sausages. Side dishes, appetizer items, dessert items, and snack items such as popcorn, peanuts, chips, and crackers do not qualify as substantial food items.

This reminds me of how weed is currently sold in DC. You pay $60 or so for a sticker or a dozen cookies, and a courier meets you somewhere and also happens to offer you a "gift". IANAL but my guess is that since possession of weed is decriminalized up to a certain amount (but dealing is not), this is a safer way of going about it.

A classic comic strip features a prostitute with a cup of pencils on the corner talking to a man. "Pencils are $20 and you can come upstairs to use my pencil sharpener for free."

Weed is legal (not just decriminalized, like Maryland, where there is still a fine) in DC for medical and recreational use, including growing, subject to amount limits. What’s restricted is commercial sale.

This is almost right -- as someone else said, Initiative 71 makes possession, use, cultivation and non-commercial transfer of small amounts of marijuana legal (not just decriminalized) in DC for adults 21 and up. So the regulatory workaround is as you say.

I'm not a lawyer either, but this pattern probably wouldn't hold up in court; dealers' inventories need to be bigger than the legal limit for possession, and the "gift" thing is a pretty thin veil around what everyone knows is actually an illegal commercial transaction. But there's a general understanding that cracking down on small-time "I-71 compliant" businesses is not a police priority, although it does happen from time to time.

Overall, I'm a pretty big fan of this approach to legalization; it allows for a competitive market without the risks of Big Cannabis advertising or of licensing schemes giving all the legalization profits to upper-class white people and cutting the economic victims of the drug war out.

This scheme comes up quite often, and the answer is always the same: autorities are not dumb, and this scheme offers you no extra legal protection whatsoever.

This is true. But it does offer a "brown bag" level of protection. I.E. the story from The Wire about how public drinking is illegal, but if you at least conceal what you're drinking in a brown bag, the cops won't hassle you because they don't really want to enforce the law.

I live in DC and the only weed dealers I hear of getting arrested are the ones who are extremely flagrant, like the one guy who operated out of a van with a giant pot leaf painted on it.

But it does. Complexity, misdirection, and deniability are the basis for getting away with anything. You keep yourself from being "beyond reasonable doubt" by adding doubt in as many ways in as many places as possible.

It is a problem.

This reminds me of how pachinko operates in Japan despite the ban on gambling.

I've seen "play for fun" slot machines in bars in states that don't allow them. If you won, the bartender would discreetly pay you.

A few years ago there were internet cafes where you could buy internet time and receive "sweepstakes tickets," then play games that revealed if you won. They were effectively casinos.

If you ever look at a prostitute's website, they'll often emphasize that you're paying to spend time with them, not for anything sexual.

The problem with these workarounds is that they're basically an invitation to corruption.

Wait, prostitutes have their own individual websites now? I was under the impression that a lot of websites had either closed or limited access to Americans for to some poor laws written to go after Backpage. The effects have been more prostitutes hurt or murdered and no less prostitution, it's just not as in the open anymore.

Let's be clear about what Backpage was doing, because it wasn't just "accepting ads from prostitutes".

Children were being kidnapped, drugged, and trafficked for sex. Those children were being advertised on Backpage.

Backpage had a choice: they could cooperate with law enforcement, they could do nothing, or they could cooperate with the traffickers to ear more money.

They chose to cooperate with the traffickers. They went out of their way to make it harder for law enforcement to protect those children.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...

Although it’s a legal document, the introduction to this report reads more like a tabloid, with “and child sex trafficking” tacked on everywhere to sensationalize things.

But here are the plain facts: Backpage.com intentionally facilitated adult prostitution, while attempting to avoid criminal liability for doing so. They also reported many thousands of child sex traffickers. It’s widely accepted that this was good for the adult prostitutes, since they no longer had to walk the streets and rely on violent pimps for protection.

As part of avoiding criminal liability, Backpage instituted a filter to remove a wide range of words from postings, for example “pay to play”, “full service”, etc. The allegation that they cooperated with child sex traffickers comes from the fact that this filter also included words like “teen” or “young”.

But on the whole, Backpage walked a difficult line between reporting any instances of child sex trafficking and continuing to give adult prostitutes a safe place to advertise.

These charges are primarily enforcing the ban on adult prostitution. The claim that Backpage was “cooperating” with child sex traffickers by filtering a wide range of words from postings is a pretty far reach, but it’s plastered all over this report in exaggerated terms. This is because many people realize that Backpage.com was beneficial to the safety of adult prostitutes, and legalizing prostitution would be more so.

Let's say we take your comment at face value, the law written to specifically target them was pretty poorly written and had wide ranging impacts. There were already ways for the government to take down Backpage if what you're saying is true, they should have taken those actions. What the law did was remove safe harbors protections for all websites to target one specific website, that's overreach. I'm not a fan of useless laws, I'm even more against laws that are harmful. Quite frankly the law didn't help stop child trafficking, and that's even more a problem. So what happened? The sites moved outside of the U.S., policing became harder, and even more children are victimized.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/after-the-closure-of...

https://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-pol-sex-trafficking-b...

Quote: "For Raines and the law’s other architects, this was the most alarming unintended consequence: their efforts to make New Yorkers virtuous had caused a spike in casual sex and prostitution."

Wanna guess today where prostitution is most prolific as well? Where it involves drugs. Current drugs laws have the same effect as to Raines ones mentioned in article. If only legalizing drugs, just like tobacco and alcohol is, and tax it to make more money for state and federal budget, would be such a good idea.

Also sort of the reason why the Spanish have tapas (Wikipedia lists it as one of the possible founding myths) - the King ordered drinks could not be served without food

I used to drink at a cigar lounge in the Deep South (USA) that offered a $40 ham and cheese sandwich as the sole menu item for the exact same reason: local laws required food to be served at your establishment if you wanted an alcohol license.

I saw one person order the sandwich in many years drinking there. Sure enough the bartender reached into the mini fridge under the bar, and would proceed to make a ham and cheese sandwich right there in the spot.

Sure enough, he charged the guy

Mayo was extra.

They used to do this in Texas but people got cranky that these "private club restaurants" (the "private club" thing being a workaround for Texas' famous wet/damp/dry laws, to have a place that could sell alcohol for on-premise consumption in a dry area) were just "bars in disguise" so the law was changed to be that any place where food service was 51% or more of sales were food is a "restaurant that happens to serve alcohol" and a place where 51% or more of sales were alcohol is a "bar." The latter were banned in dry and damp areas that hadn't voted to permit on-premise consumption bars.

The wet/damp/dry bit was similarly crazy. For years, a so-called local option vote could be held inside any political district: county, city, justice of the peace, water supply, volunteer fire department, or school district. As long as the petition met the rules, the district had to hold a vote. That led to a situation where a school district near Houston had to hold a local option election, so then the legislature changed the law to delete school districts from the eligible list.

Also: Dry - No alcohol sales permitted except in "private clubs;" damp - beer and wine only, on-premise hard alcohol allowed if by a separate vote; wet - all types of alcohol, on-premise or off.

There was some music event recently that prevented vendors from selling water.

Instead they sold you a peanut for $2 and the water was for free.

Mind you the venue was selling water for like $8 a bottle.

> There was some music event recently that prevented vendors from selling water.

> Instead they sold you a peanut for $2 and the water was for free.

> Mind you the venue was selling water for like $8 a bottle.

All it takes is one person to pass out from heat exhaustion to end this practice.

Indiana at least until very recently had much more onerous regulations around food in bars(namely there must be a sandwich, a soup, coffee, and milk available). Here's an example compliance menu [1]

EDIT: Included details of the regulations.

[1]: https://www.kegworks.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Scree...

A local brewery complied with this by having a sign that said they would serve pizza, but it was something like from Dominoes and would cost 150$ if you ordered it.

In Louisiana, I believe breweries have the opposite problem: the majority of their revenue must be from beer, so if they sell too much food they're in trouble. I think some get around this with pop-up restaurants, maybe paying a fixed fee to be there.

Another weird rule is that Louisiana bars cannot allow children, even with parents, but breweries can. So breweries are often full of children. One in New Orleans has a bounce house on weekends.

Breweries in Montana are full of children. Play areas with toys are common and some places even go so far as to make a beer-free beverage like root beer or kombucha.

In dutch there is the expression "glazen boterham" ("glass sandwich") which today at least refers to a glass of beer, I wonder if the dutch expression is somehow connected to this story... I always assumed this merely referenced the caloric content of the alcoholic beverage...

In Estonia there is "vedel leib" (liquid bread), meaning beer. "Leib" means rye bread (dark bread), not white bread for additional nuance. White bread ("sai" in Estonian) was fancy and somewhat expansive food, if we talk about 19th or early 20th century.

"Barley Sandwich" is a common-enough phrase in Canada as well, at least in the west.

I take it as a European "that's all I need for lunch" quip

Rules-lawyering at its finest.

This kind of reminds me of the “is a jaffa cake a biscuit” legal fight, which mattered a great deal for VAT purposes.

See also -- Marvel's legal team: "The X-Men aren't really people."

https://mentalfloss.com/article/92007/why-us-federal-court-r...

Or a classic alt.sex.stories signature:

"All creatures in this story live in a solar system where one year is equal to 1,000 Earth years."

Odd story. My grandmother worked for a while a fry cook. She worked at a diner. Next door was a bar.

The state passed a law that said bars couldn't have windows.

The bar next door to her work had a fine set of windows. The owners of the diner and bar next door installed a door and a window in the wall between the bar and the diners kitchen. And the bar got a restaurant license. Which was cheaper.

Neener neener.

That's the opposite of the Raines Law, which I believe said bars could only allow drinking in areas visible through the window.

There's still laws like this in Utah. I was at a brewery that required you to buy food before they could fill your growler up. IIRC they had toast for 25¢

Reminds me exactly of the sugar taxes going on (except it you're Starbucks in Seattle, that sugar is exempt from law)

Somewhat an aside, but Raines Law Room in the Flatiron in NYC is a great little speakeasy/cocktail bar and brings back this vibe a bit.

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