Alcohol production and sales during Prohibition: For Medicinal Use

December 18, 2015 10:10 PM

The National Prohibition Act, known informally as the Volstead Act, was enacted to carry out the intent of the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition in the United States. There were three key exemptions: wine for sacramental purposes, 200 gallons per calendar year for a household in which two or more adults reside, and liquor or alcohol prescribed by a physician for medicine. The U.S. Treasury Department authorized physicians to write prescriptions for medicinal alcohol, but everyone knew what the whiskey was really for.

Then as now, the adaptability of the medical profession was impressive. In 1917, unanimous opinion of the Council on Health and Public Infrastructure that alcohol has no drug value (Google books preview), but five years later, a "Referendum on the Use of Alcohol in the Medical Profession" found alcoholic beverages were in fact useful for treating twenty-seven separate conditions (Gbp), including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snakebite, lactation problems, and old age.

All it took to acquire a liquor prescription was cash — generally about $3, the equivalent of about $40 today — placed in the hand of an agreeable doctor. It cost $3 to $4 more to have it filled by the local pharmacist.

Some physicians may have made their own alcohol during Prohibition, to actually treat their patients and/or make money. The alcohol makers and bottlers got into the game, often labeling bottles "For Medicinal Use," though some of that labeling pre-dated Prohibition.

posted by filthy light thief (14 comments total)

Is that about a bottle a day for the sacramental wine? Some people must've been sinning all over the place.
posted by pompomtom at 10:39 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wow, that sounds like 98% of medicinal marijuana prescriptions. That being said, it'd be inhumane to keep marijuana from cancer (and other needing) patients.
posted by el io at 10:45 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

This topic was just on the radio today, because a historian of the Prohibition era turned up a journal kept by a doctor living in New York at the time who'd not only gone into alcohol distribution as a side gig, but invented cocktails of his own:

Bad Poetry, Great Booze: The Story Of The Hidden Bootlegger's Manual
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:15 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I promise you, ALL my alcohol use is medicinal. ALL of it.
posted by hippybear at 11:16 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

We do love our drugs...

Those loopholes look almost exactly like the bullshit the MMJ folks have spewed. Legalize it! Then clean up the after-effects.
posted by Windopaene at 11:27 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder if I can ask my doctor for a prescription for Manhattans at my next visit.

"This dog here in the office against policy? You'll find that he has a cask around his neck with all the makings for a variety of cocktails, and he'll pour one for me if I'm ever trapped in an avalanche. That dog is a service animal."
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:46 PM on December 18, 2015

My great-great-grandparents were teatotal, Protestant Swiss farm folk who owned wine grape vineyards in western PA from the 1880s to the 1930s with family connections in grocery distribution. Every year during Prohibition they packed up the kids in an enormous Studebaker, with a huge amount of luggage, and drove to Atlantic City. Only recently have we determined that alcohol probably paid for the trip and doubtless kept the families finances going. The old farm had extensive wine cellars that were hidden until the 60s and the grapes were not table grapes.

I'm guessing their story wasn't all that unusual.
posted by kinnakeet at 11:50 PM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

A maybe less well known exemption was that farmers were allowed to make hard cider from their orchards.
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:03 AM on December 19, 2015

Both wine and hard cider were allowed to "preserve fruit." (Interestingly, the farm districts were the ones that most supported Prohibition.)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:23 AM on December 19, 2015

Those loopholes look almost exactly like the bullshit the MMJ folks have spewed. Legalize it! Then clean up the after-effects.

If you're attempting to argue against legalized cannabis you probably shouldn't compare it to prohibition. Outlawing alcohol was a objectively terrible idea.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:34 AM on December 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Originally Prohibition was calling for a ban on "hard spirits" - liquor, whiskeys, gin, etc. The idea of alcoholism and addiction didn't exist, but it was this demon spirit that made good men do horrible things - before comprehensive water sanitation it was safer to drink Beer and Ciders. Small Beers - 3% or less - were common and drunk by the pint easily. But add that same attitude towards whiskey, with no framework for moderation, and things get insane.

Add in the Civil War introducing millions of men to what we would later call PTSD, the majority of women being dependent on men for the livelihood (and divorce, property ownership and higher education barely even considered options), a growing nation under the throws of industrialization, increasing anti-immigrant sentiments, and you get this boiling point of societal ails and injustices that all appear to be centered around this Demon Spirit. So in that light, Prohibition makes sense if it is truly this horrible liquor that is causing men to beat their wives to death, or for those listless immigrants to fail to succeed because their weak constitutions are subject to temptation.

It is also not surprising when you realize that the 18th amendment introduced Prohibition and the 19th gave women the right to vote - these were linked social movements. Since alcohol was viewed as destructive to the family unit, which was the domain of women, social movements to empower them were also linked with the ideal of removing that destructive force - creating situations where anti-prohibitionists were also anti-suffrage.

As for marijuana (and general drug prohibition) those are still offshoots of the same paternalistic "those people can't handle their Liquor/Coke/Heroin/Demon Weed" that also lumped in the illegal drug trade and trafficking (which was first really established thanks to Prohibition turning the otherwise small time local 'community security racket' into booze runners who would then move on to easier to move substances) related violence with the effects of the substances themselves. It is depressing how often our lack of willingness to understand how systems inter-relate in complicated fashions, instead insisting there are some simplistic models of human nature based around good and evil that are all predetermined, Calvinism has kind of fucked up American politics for a long time.

Ken Burns' Prohibition documentary is fascinating for folks looking for a nuanced history of that time in America leading up to and during Prohibition.
posted by mrzarquon at 9:08 AM on December 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

I found a small, unopened bottled of Prohibition-era medicinal whiskey when we cleaned out my hoarder great-aunt's apartment. After consulting AskMe, we tasted it. It was 'good, but weird,' according to the tasters who knew anything about whiskey.
posted by nonasuch at 10:36 AM on December 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Benzodiazepenes/barbiturates hadn't been invented yet. Those have a similar mechanism of action to alcohol, and today benzos are some of the most widely prescribed medications in the world.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 1:14 PM on December 19, 2015

Seconding the recommendation for the Ken Burns documentary on the subject.
posted by pmurray63 at 10:12 AM on December 20, 2015