Complex Numbers

Jumping Through Loopholes

I'm usually a law-abiding citizen. Or, well, I try to be; sometimes it seems laws are designed so that if They want to get you for something, They can find a reason.

But some laws are fundamentally unjust, and need to be broken. Cracked provides some examples in:

    6 Loopholes People Used to Break the Law and Get Drunk  
Technically, if you’re on a train, everything is legal

6. Pay to See the Blind Pig

During Prohibition, a bar could not legally operate and sell alcohol. No one could legally sell alcohol (without receiving special exemptions, such as for medicinal use), or manufacture alcohol, or transport alcohol. The law didn’t ban drinking alcohol, however, or handing the stuff to someone else without charging them any money.

It could, of course, be argued that it's hard to drink alcohol if one is prohibited from buying, making, or moving it. But, at least here in the US, lawyers thrive on technicalities.

But suppose an establishment were to hand out a drink for free and charge customers for something else? Say, they charge a customer for some entertainment — for instance, the chance to look at a marvelous animal. As for the drink the barman serves the customer, well, no one’s purchasing that.

Not mentioned: how the pig got blind. Look, I'm all for eating the tasty critters, but mutilating them doesn't fly. This was nearly a hundred years ago, though, and people didn't generally think that way.

This idea is why one alternate name for a speakeasy is a “blind pig.” And if you’re wondering why the police would ever be fooled by this, know that plenty of police didn’t really care about Prohibition laws and were possibly drinking right along with everyone else.

Which may explain why some cops love do do drug busts: it provides them with free product.

5. Instructions on How to Absolutely Not Make Wine

They had this sort of thing for beer, too.

Individual families were still allowed to make a limited amount of wine, but if you were to sell people the raw materials for making wine, along with instructions, you might find yourself in trouble.

This would be like selling fertilizer with instructions on how to ensure it never becomes a bomb. Except there's good reason to keep people from making bombs.

“After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn to wine.”

These days, of course, the surest way to get a certain group of people to do something is to tell them not to do it.

4. Stick Everyone on a Train

Even when alcohol is legal in the country, you need a license to sell it. One British gin maker, Tapling & Meegan Distilling, dutifully applied for this license, but it was taking too long to get approved. So they did the only reasonable thing and turned to steampunk.

Now, there's a story idea.

Within all the country’s many alcohol regulations is a line of law saying the usual license requirements do not apply to trains in motion.

The downside of this is obvious: motion sickness exacerbated by drunkenness.

3. Let’s Call Beer Something Else

Complex regulations define exactly what beverages are, which is why you generally cannot put lemonade in a bottle and sell it as tomato juice. In Texas, they had a rule about beer: It could not contain more than 4 percent alcohol by volume.

Ah, yes, the old "name a thing something else to get around regulations" trick. No wonder fermented beverage categories can be misleading.

A lager that appears to be beer by most conventional definitions would be labeled, in fine print, “In Texas, malt liquor.”

I'm pretty sure some states still have ABV maximums for beer. As the article notes, Texas isn't one of them. But it's not a good look for a state that prides itself on limiting government interference in peoples' lives. Which, incidentally, they clearly don't do.

2. Turning Nightclubs into Pop-up Restaurants

This next law lasted from 1935 to 2000, in Ireland, a place not entirely unfamiliar with alcohol.

Now that's a cheap shot. Pun intended.

Establishments were not allowed to serve alcohol at night unless they also served a meal.

This sort of thing has been the law here in the US, off and on, depending on where you are. Hell, even my state has a version of the rule, which is why you'll technically never find a bar in Virginia; only restaurants that happen to serve booze.

The dish of choice at these clubs? Curry.

Yeah, that couldn't have ended well.

1. The Inedible Sandwich

That Irish policy hearkens to an older and famous law from New York. Way back in 1896, the same time that they made the controversial decision to raise the drinking age from 16 to 18, the state passed a law saying bars couldn’t serve alcohol on Sundays.

Like I said.

Bars, which served no actual food, qualified for the exemption by offering a sandwich. Not sandwiches, but a singular sandwich that a bar would pass from customer to customer without anyone eating it. This was named the “Raines sandwich,” after John Raines, the senator who wrote the law.

I'd heard about this loophole before, of course. It still amuses me.

The takeaway here is that, if you're clever, you can find a way around unjust laws without flagrantly breaking them. And I approve.