← Ridiculous History
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- [00:00]
A
Fellow ridiculous historians, thank you so much for tuning in. We are returning with a classic episode. This is about a period in US History that always amazed us. Noel, you and I talk about this often. Prohibition doesn't really work for anything.
- [00:22]
B
Yeah, it's kind of like the Streisand effect. If you really want people talking about your business, you should tell them to buzz off.
- [00:31]
A
Yeah. We looked back in 2019 at the National Prohibition act of the United states. So from 1920 to 1933, the US was technically a dry country because this act made it illegal to manufacture, sell or transport alcohol. But there were a lot of loopholes and they got so ridiculous.
- [00:58]
B
They did. And I'm certain that in this episode I bring up the classic I Love Lucy episode where she shills for a company called Vitamida Vegemin that is basically just a bunch of booze.
- [01:11]
A
Well, let's find out together. Thank you again, folks. We'll roll the tape.
- [01:17]
B
Everyone deserves to be connected. T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in the US Cellular Store in Pasco. Bigger network the combination of T Mobile and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans. Plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required 2% that's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator on available. I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's 2% on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [03:23]
A
Ridiculous history is a production of iHeartRadio. The actor, vaudeville perform, former cowboy and humorist Will Rogers once famously said that the American people will vote dry so long as they are able to stagger to the polls. Voting dry, meaning voting against legalized alcohol. Welcome to the show. I'm Ben.
- [04:08]
B
My name is. No, that's really funny, Ben. That's a very good little loaded. What do you call it? It's like a pun, turn of phrase.
- [04:16]
A
I mean, yeah, sort of a.
- [04:18]
B
It's sort of a double message. Like, it's like a hidden meaning. Voting dry, to me would mean voting sober, but as long as they can stumble the polls implying voting drunk, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of meaning. We gotta unpack in that. That has to do with today's story because as we know, voting also has a history of drunkenness. Remember we did an episode about when people used to booze people up at the polls and then keep them hostage and then keep them hostage in these weird little, you know, speakeasy booze dungeons. We're not talking about that today. Exactly. We are talking about prohibition. A particular exception that was made for drinking alcohol during that time.
- [04:57]
A
Right, right. And speaking of exceptional people and circumstances, let's give a shout out to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Casey, just for the record, to establish, all three of us are not teetotalers, right?
- [05:15]
B
Yeah, that's correct. I'll have a drink now and again. I mean, I'm. No, no, definitely not. I love that expression, though.
- [05:20]
A
Teetotaler.
- [05:21]
B
Teetotaler.
- [05:22]
A
It's fun to say. And it sounds like a test for people who have been drinking.
- [05:26]
B
Exactly.
- [05:26]
A
If you pronounce it correctly, but yes, yes, Noel, you're right. Nowadays, when we think of prohibition, we think of, you know, Al Capone. We think of. Some of us think of the origin of some race cars. But this was A very serious problem. For 13 years, the National Prohibition act, otherwise known as the Volstead act, attempted to keep people in the United States from drinking, transporting, even making any intoxicating beverage.
- [06:02]
B
How'd that work, though, Ben? How'd that work? 100% abstinence, right?
- [06:06]
A
Oh, boy. Yeah, right.
- [06:07]
B
Complete success.
- [06:08]
A
I'm gonna move this microphone because I like making eye contact with you. Can we keep that part in?
- [06:15]
B
Of course.
- [06:17]
A
It's a Monday morning, guys.
- [06:18]
B
It really is. But no, I mean, I'm obviously being a little sarcastic because as we know, when you make people. When you tell people they can't do something, they just want to do it even more, don't they?
- [06:27]
A
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. It's one of the hallmarks of you as a parent, know, reverse psychology is one of the hallmarks of any social dynamic.
- [06:37]
B
Right, Absolutely. And I mean, I have learned that anytime I tell my kid not to do something or scold her about doing something, I can see the little glint in her eye of just the itch that she's gotta scratch. He's gotta do that thing. If I tell her not to play the drums on the dinner table with scutlery, then the moment I look away, she starts, like, kind of just itching to tap that fork on the table.
- [06:58]
A
Just a little paradiddle, really.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, exactly. No, and it's the same with human nature in general. People don't like being told what they can and can't do, especially when it's something they've done freely for a long time.
- [07:09]
A
Yeah, absolutely. It's easier to prevent someone from beginning a habit or thing that it's much more difficult to get them to stop after they've already acclimated. And that's why Prohibition was. Spoiler alert, ridiculous historians, not completely successful from 1920 to 1933. Uncle Sam gave it the old college try. But very, very quickly, doctors and politicians realized that some exceptions had to apply. This could not be an absolutist rule because, you know, as you said, Noel, there were already people very well acquainted with drinking. Some of these people had become dependent on alcohol, so they would have painful physiological withdrawal systems if they weren't able to have access to that substance.
- [08:02]
B
That's right. Yeah. I mean, the shakes, the DTs, that stuff is real. If you are absolutely addicted to alcohol, you can experience hallucinations, all kinds of very disruptive things that can cause you to not go about your normal existence.
- [08:18]
A
And that's why, according to Daniel Okrent, the author of Last the Rise and Fall of prohibition. Some 15,000 doctors applied for permits during the first six months of the Volstead Act. These permits would allow them to prescribe alcohol, but not just like a. I don't know, like a regular medicinal alcohol. It allowed them to prescribe specific types of alcohol, Right?
- [08:51]
B
Yeah. Rye whiskey, scotch. Also, I believe there were some clear ones on the list too, right?
- [08:57]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, why would you go to a doctor's office if you don't leave with a prescription for gin? You know what I mean? That applies in the modern day, probably.
- [09:05]
B
Gin is interesting too, because I always think of gin as being sort of an herbal type tasting booze. It's probably the closest thing to like, what you might have drunk for medicine anyway.
- [09:18]
A
Right, right. With a juniper berry base. Right. So already we can see the opportunity for corruption. Right. That lingers here because sure, a lot of doctors during this time were prescribing alcohol with nothing other than medicinal interest at hand. But also, you can't walk away from the money because there wasn't much federal oversight of these doctors. You're a doctor, you write prescriptions. As long as it's not illegal. You can write prescriptions for whatever you want, whenever you want.
- [09:54]
B
But it was illegal.
- [09:56]
A
Not if you had the permit.
- [09:57]
B
I see. Got it. You know, this reminds me of the very obvious parallel in our modern day with marijuana prohibition and that tide kind of turning. There was a while where it was a little easier maybe than it should have been to get a medical marijuana card or prescription. And that was the case with this situation as well. It became, see, there's a great story about Winston Churchill, a case study kind of where he got hit by a car while doing a lecture at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And he got a cut on his forehead and he bruised his chest and had a sprained shoulder. And he was prescribed kind of carte blanche access to alcohol, where he had a doctor's note, more so than a prescription, signed by Dr. Otto C. Pickart, that said, this is to certify that the post accident convalescence of the honorable Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at mealtimes. The quantity is naturally indefinite, but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters. And then there's a handwritten note on the top under this guy's letterhead, this doctor from New York saying, keep on hand. So basically this was just a get out of jail free card for Winston Churchill to be able to drink as he typically did, which we know Churchill was fond of his spirits I love the phrase there.
- [11:19]
A
Naturally indefinite. He was walking around with this doctor's note on his person whenever he wanted to buy alcohol. And whenever. I don't think this would happen very often because it's Winston Churchill, but whenever, maybe an authority figure stopped him and said, hey, you absolute lush, put this down. You're supposed to be in charge of the country.
- [11:47]
B
And this doctor's note from Churchill is dated January 26, 1932, which as we know, was on the tail end of Prohibition, which wrapped up in 1933 in earnest. But by this point, according to a fantastic Atlas Obscura article by Paula Maggia, the doctors were becoming much more like the modern day equivalent of marijuana dispensaries than they were doctor's offices, where they were stocked with every type of booze you could imagine. They were almost more like an off the books liquor store than even a doctor's office. Because they were cleaning up, doing this. They were able to like make good money and have a legal loophole out of prohibition.
- [12:27]
A
Absolutely. As you find in a great article on how stuff works by Michelle Constant Antonovsky. Pretty much right after prohibition began and doctors realized they could get these permits, they also realized that alcohol was a useful treatment for no less than 27 separate medical conditions. This included stuff like cancer, incurable cancer, anxiety. But it also included diabetes, snakebites, and even lactation problems. So you're a nursing mother and you're having issues lactating. You know what you need? Some of grandpa's leg medicine, which is a weird, I think, Tennessee term for whiskey.
- [13:10]
B
That's actually my favorite brand.
- [13:12]
A
It's grandpa's leg medicine. Oh, maybe I'm thinking of moonshine. I smell a T shirt, Noel. I think that's a great. That's a great T shirt, right? Grandpa's leg medicine.
- [13:21]
B
Grandpa's leg medicine. I can picture that with like an old timey label with like XXX on it, you know, and then ridiculous history written really small on the bottom.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah, I'm fine with that. I mean, I have no problem with us advertising alcohol as long as it's our own fake alcohol.
- [13:36]
B
Exactly. Speaking of which, just to take a quick pause from today's topic, have you seen the amazing Casey on the case T shirts that are now available in the Teepublic store?
- [13:46]
A
Oh, saving it for the end, but I'm glad you brought it up.
- [13:49]
B
I just want to make people make sure you're aware.
- [13:51]
A
Stop what you're doing. You can go to our website ridiculoushistoryshow.com or you can go directly to our store, teepublic.com ridiculous history. And check out our newest shirt, which I pulled it up because I love looking at this. We've revealed this on air, right? That Casey used to be a child model? Yep. Okay. So, Casey, can you tell us about how this all came to be?
- [14:18]
B
Yeah, well, there was kind of a grassroots campaign to have my face on a T shirt. I really didn't like the idea at
- [14:26]
A
first, but I apologize.
- [14:27]
B
I kind of thought, you know, we could kind of kill two birds with one stone here. We could finally deliver those modeling pics from my youth and my face on a T shirt. So just kind of combine the two and, you know, I think the result's pretty spectacular. I gotta say, I agree. So check it out. It's. It's worth your. Worth your. Worth your dime, for sure.
- [14:46]
A
Casey on the case.
- [14:53]
B
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone. Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways, only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Day or night, VRBoCare is here 247 to help make every part of your stay seamless. If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready whenever you reach out. From the moment you book to the moment you head home, we're here to help things run smoothly. Because a great trip starts with the right support. And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either. Mornings can feel like a lot. But there's one small choice that can make mornings feel good sometimes. Silk Protein. It's the smooth plant based beverage with 13 grams of complete plant protein and 50% less sugar than dairy milk. Pour it into your cereal, blend it into a smoothie, stir it into your coffee. Silk Protein makes mornings feel a little calmer, a little brighter, a little more. Okay, I got this. Silk Protein. Feel planty. Good. Before we had AT&T business wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a 14 point turn to get back on route. A 14 point turn. An influencer. Even livestream the whole thing. Not good for business. Now with AT&T business, wireless routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time. And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though. AT&T business Wireless Connecting changes everything.
- [16:55]
A
We are exploring the story of Prohibition, and as you had pointed out, man, there are quite a few modern parallels, especially when we talk about the purpose for a prescribed substance. So this medicinal alcohol, sort of like medicinal marijuana, becomes a popular loophole. Funny thing is, before prohibition was in effect, doctors knew the score. They knew that alcohol was not medicine. But during Prohibition, the American Medical association, or AMA changed its opinion. And the weird thing is that the U.S. treasury Department backed them up. They authorized doctors to write prescriptions for alcohol. And they were given, the doctors were given these government prescription forms to prescribe, quote, medicinal whiskey at pharmacies. But this was so corrupt and was so open to abuse. Because we're not just talking about people stealing prescription pads. We're talking about people making counterfeit prescription pads and then using that to like, pass around with their friends. And let's just point out that the pharmacies did not ask as many questions as they should have.
- [18:11]
B
Oh, certainly not. Certainly not. And it's like I said, with the whole comparison to the modern day marijuana prescriptions, you could kind of just go in and say you had a. It got to the point eventually as a. Pretty recently where you can kind of just say you have a little back pain or you have maybe you got an eye twitch.
- [18:28]
A
Yeah.
- [18:28]
B
And that's about all it takes. And you have a seat on a couch, talk to somebody behind a desk, answer these few questions. You know what they're looking for, so you just give it to them, give them what they want. And they don't really ask any questions. They certainly don't run any tests or require any real burden of proof. And that was exactly the case with these, with these, these pharmacies giving out these booze prescriptions.
- [18:49]
A
A vague sense of unease.
- [18:52]
B
That's right.
- [18:53]
A
Walking in and saying, I don't trust my elbows and there's nothing I could do about it.
- [18:57]
B
Well, the funny thing is, isn't that why people drink in the first place? To combat that vague sense of unease about life in the world? Yeah.
- [19:05]
A
So this leads us to an interesting story because we're emphasizing the role of the doctors, but we haven't talked a lot about the pharmacist. And the pharmacists are part of the supply chain. Historians have suspicions about one famous pharmacist, Charles Walgreen.
- [19:24]
B
Of the Walgreen. Walgreens. Yes.
- [19:26]
A
Of the Walgreens. Walgreens. The very same. Throughout the 1920s, the Walgreens pharmacy change encountered tremendous growth. They expanded from 20 stores to 525. For a long time, people would credit the introduction of the milkshake to the pharmacy's success. But it sounds like alcohol may have played a more prominent role. In an interview, Charles Walgreen Jr. Said that while his father worried about the danger of stores catching fire, he always wanted the fire department to get in and out as quickly as possible because whenever they came in, the fire department would steal a case of liquor from the back.
- [20:10]
B
Yikes.
- [20:11]
A
So this, we, we know that there was a lot of money to be had. I mean, organized crime had a bonanza with this, right?
- [20:19]
B
Oh, yeah, sure. You got your Al Capones, you got your bootlegging Tommy gun toting gangsters, you know, running those speakeasies and all the, with the flapper girls and all that thing, you know, this, the, the. They were high times underground. But I didn't really realize that this was happening above ground as well, completely legally, and that Walgreens played a huge part in that. I mean, there's an article on vinepair.com called the $75 billion business that was Built Selling Whiskey during Prohibition Legally by Emily Bell. And it shows a fantastic shot of what a behind the counter situation at Walgreens would have looked like. And it's, you know, you've got your apothecary type bottles and, you know, things with a little plastic, you know, glass stoppers in it, but a lot of it is straight up booze.
- [21:06]
A
That's right. This was a business. Every 10 days, patients could pay about $3 for a prescription and another three or four dollars to have it filled. And they would get about a pint of booze. And that's not necessarily beer, of course. This was again, medicinal liquor. So ultimately, according to Okrent, the guy I mentioned earlier in last call, according to him, what this really functioned as was a new revenue stream for physicians and pharmacists. You know, every ten days you're getting three bucks, the pharmacy's getting three or four bucks, and multiply that out by the number of patients you have. Not to put too dark a spin on it, but similar circumstances have occurred recently in the last few years, not just with marijuana, but with opioids. The so called. This is tough for my Tennessee accent. The so called pill mills.
- [22:04]
B
Yeah, exactly. Where again, it doesn't take much burden of proof to get a doctor to prescribe you whatever, you know, tickles your fancy as far as heavy opioid drugs are concerned. And there's also the whole idea of doctor shopping. If you've got multiple pill mill situations, you can go from one to the other and have none of them really know about each other. And you can just be kind of swimming in this stuff. And that is one of the reasons, aside from laxness and utter irresponsibility on the part of big Pharma that caused the opioid epidemic that is such a huge problem in our country.
- [22:42]
A
And we see the same sort of federal level corruption in the turn of the century Prohibition days. There's a great example about. You remember the Great Gatsby, right, by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Oh, yeah, yeah. So there's a real life guy named George Remus who inspired the Great Gatsby. And he figured out how to play the system. He thought medicinal whiskey was a bang up business model. So he bought a ton of distilleries which had these storage areas full of whiskey that could not be sold. So he bought pharmacies for the express purpose of distributing this whiskey. And then he bribed the feds to allow more and more whiskey to sort of, what do they call it in retail stores? Shrinkage allowed whiskey to disappear from the official record. And so in a very short amount of time, he made quite a bit of money. And let's get back to those justifications because there is one great example from the Atlas Obscura article we mentioned earlier. In Providence, Rhode island, one physician prescribed whiskey for a single condition, debility. And debility just means, by the way, physical weakness, just feeling down.
- [23:58]
B
It's sort of like a lighter version of being debilitated, I guess, just oh my.
- [24:03]
A
Debility.
- [24:04]
B
Oh, yeah, exactly.
- [24:07]
A
I'm going to bring debility back. So legally speaking, these physicians could get their licenses revoked if they were found to be distributing medicinal liquor for anything less than medical purposes. However, what that really translated to, if we're being honest, is they were either super blatant about what they were doing or they didn't bribe the right people. Only about 170 doctors per year ever had their licenses revoked.
- [24:40]
B
And here's the thing. I mean, it really wasn't, as it progressed throughout Prohibition, it really was not just a flash in the pan or like the exception to the rule. It kind of became the rule. And I don't know, Ben, I don't know if you can tell me this, but I did get a sense that the Winston Churchill example was kind of how it was. It was a little bit more something that was available to the privileged or people that had access to doctors that would work with them.
- [25:08]
A
Yeah. If you had the money, you could play ball. You know what I mean? So this is still a time where there's a lot of institutionalized racism, there's class warfare, it's the Gilded Age, the Roaring twenties of inequality. This stuff was not necessarily cheap for the average person, but it was still a big business. Physicians wrote an estimated 11 million prescriptions per year. And the Prohibition commissioner, John F. Kramer, cited, anecdotally, one doctor who wrote 475 prescriptions for whiskey in one day.
- [25:49]
B
Geez. Yeah. And I believe the rough estimate of the number of prescriptions written throughout this period when Prohibition was the law of the land, was around 11 million prescriptions. So while it certainly wasn't available to everybody, it was available to quite a few individuals that knew how to, you know, milk this particular loophole.
- [26:15]
A
And as we know, this was just one of several loopholes. Right. We already talked about in the past the. The hilarious practice of selling concentrated grape juice with very specific instructions on what not to do. Because if you obeyed these instructions, you would accidentally make wine, and you should turn that into the authorities if you happen to accidentally take these, like, three or four steps. So everybody was lying to themselves as individuals, as communities, as a nation, and. But the numbers spoke for themselves. Upper crust Americans would take advantage of French champagne, which was imported for medicinal use, so much so that imports skyrocketed by 332% in 1920 alone. People who still had the drive to drink, but maybe not the scratch to go to the pharmacy, would make alcohol for themselves using corn syrup to make moonshine. The moonshine would be counterfeited or adulterated and supplied to speak easies, which used to be cool. Speakeasies aren't really that cool anymore, right? Am I? Old speakeasies are cool. Yeah. When's the last time you went to a cool speakeasy?
- [27:42]
B
I went to. I don't know. I mean, what makes. What makes a speakeasy is.
- [27:45]
A
There's the. There's the.
- [27:46]
B
Gotta be a basement. Right.
- [27:47]
A
It's like the whole story of, you know, the whole dog and pony show business of, like, you have to go to a password thing, know a password,
- [27:55]
B
secret phone booth or something like that.
- [27:57]
A
I think that's fun, but people told me it's corny now.
- [28:00]
B
Maybe so. I don't know. I mean, I'm not. I'm not saying I'm like the arbiter of cool or anything, but I did go to, I think, what was considered a speakeasy a couple months ago in New York, and it Was like a Japanese themed one and all the drinks were like matcha powder and like different Japanese whiskeys, and it was good. I think another thing that makes a speakeasy a speakeasy is that it's very expensive. Dare I say overpriced. Dare you. I dare. Because can you imagine in Prohibition era, you know, it was basically. It was not basically, it was an illegal enterprise. So of course the markup was probably nuts because you couldn't get it right.
- [28:33]
A
And you might not know exactly what you're buying. If you haven't checked it out before, check out our previous episode on the US Government's plan to poison the heck out of the hundreds of people.
- [28:46]
B
That'll show them.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah, through adulterating the alcohol that was being sold illegally. This was not sustainable. There were other exceptions that we should list. To be fair. There were religious exemptions. You know, if you were a priest administering communion or a rabbi, you had the ability to create your own alcohol or obtain it for use in religious services. But these things were not as big of a business as the medical loophole, which seems like a no brainer. You know what? I know this is a history show, but I predict this kind of loophole will come up again. Whatever the next substance our nation attempts to prohibit is, we will find ourselves in a situation where someone says, I need a prescription for my debility, for my general unease. And nothing but Quaaludes will. Will help.
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, it's true. That's why they call it. That's where the quail comes from in Quaaludes, because it's for quelling that just generalized unease.
- [29:51]
A
Facts. These are facts. So as we know, Prohibition ultimately came to an end. The 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, ending the era of illegal booze and ending the financial windfall for a lot of pharmacies and a lot of of doctors. And going back to what we said at the top about reverse psychology, Oxford University Press noted that alcohol enthusiasts actually drank more liquor during Prohibition than before Prohibition.
- [30:30]
B
And it's that itch, man, telling you, it's that lick. You tell me what I can't do, I'm gonna do. I'm gonna double down and say, oh, I can do it, and I will.
- [30:40]
A
And alcohol consumption Pre prohibition. So pre1920 had been trending toward beer. You know what I mean? Like, you get off work, you have a couple of beers with your buddies, right? And then you go home to dinner or you cook something. I don't know. But during the era of prohibition, 75% of all alcoholic beverages were liquor. Because now people, they didn't just drink more, they went for the hard stuff. Because why risk getting on the wrong side of the law over, you know, a Miller Lite or what's another beer? I don't want to just name Miller Lite. There are other beers. There's a Miller High Life. Miller High Life. The champagne of beers.
- [31:21]
B
The Champagne of Beers. I believe Miller makes other products as well.
- [31:25]
A
I heard the phrase for Budweiser. I heard the phrase, you know, Bud Light. We all know Bud Light. But I heard someone describe regular Budweiser as Bud Heavy.
- [31:36]
B
That sounds about right.
- [31:37]
A
Seems like an awkward phrase. But now if you are listening to this, we hope that you enjoy the freedom to have a boozy cocktail, an ice cold beer, a glass of wine to your heart's content, as long as you are responsible about it and hate. But maybe we end today's show on a question about modern prohibition. Do you believe that there are examples of prohibition working? Or is Prohibition inherently doomed to fail due to that, you know, that reverse psychology trick that we were talking about earlier? Or is it just a matter of what is most profitable for the government and the companies involved? Let us know. You can find us on our Facebook page where we are ridiculous historians. You can find us on Twitter. You can find our show on Instagram. But wait, as Billy Mays was want to say, there's more. You can find my co host and I on our own personal Instagrams.
- [32:43]
B
Turns out we have lives. It's weird. We're not just locked in the shipping container 24 hours a day, although we as a decent percentage of the day. I am at Embryonic Insider and I
- [32:53]
A
am at Ben Bolan. Big thanks to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Again, if you thought that we were just blowing smoke about this Casey on the case T shirt, we really like it. We're over the moon about it. And we have had a pretty tough time not mentioning this on previous episodes because we didn't want anyone to know about it until it hit the store. Right. That's accurate.
- [33:21]
B
Mm. Casey is adorable little Dickens. And it really has the appearance of some kind of 80s noir, LA detective kind of thing where it's this very stark black and white image of young Casey and the text looks like Dirty Dancing or something like that. It's pretty fantastic.
- [33:38]
A
And his face is all power moved.
- [33:40]
B
Very pensive, very power move. A lot going on behind those deep baby blue eyes. Although you can't tell, I don't know what color are Your eyes, Casey, they are blue.
- [33:48]
A
Oh, right.
- [33:48]
B
Nailed it. But the image is black and white, so. Yeah, you. You'd never know.
- [33:51]
A
Well, that will have to wait for the next T shirt. But, yeah, do check it out. We're ordering some for ourselves, which, Casey, apologies in advance if that gets weird. In the meantime, we'd also like to thank Alex Williams, who composed our track. We'd like to thank our research associate, Gabe. And you know what? While we're. While we're handing out thank yous, like their booze prescriptions during Prohibition, that should
- [34:16]
B
be a thing that needs to take off. We need to make that happen.
- [34:19]
A
Oh, handing out things? No, no, no.
- [34:21]
B
Just. Just that as an expression. Sort of like selling. Selling. I could sell something to a man. I could sell a ketchup popsicle to a man in white gloves. This idea of, like, willy nilly, just giving things away, passing stuff out, like booze prescriptions during prohibition.
- [34:33]
A
It helps that it rhymes, right?
- [34:35]
B
I like it.
- [34:36]
A
I would like to thank. What was that band who did Love Will Tear Us Apart Again?
- [34:42]
B
That was Joy Division.
- [34:43]
A
Joy Division. I'd like to thank Joy Division. I quite enjoy that song.
- [34:47]
B
I would like to thank New Order, who I kind of prefer Hot Take Nolan. I know, right? Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [34:53]
A
No, I'm not picking Battles of the Bands. I'm just saying I like that song. There's a surprisingly wide variety of covers of that song as well. But I'd also like to thank you, Noel.
- [35:06]
B
Ben. I accept your thanks with an open heart and I shoot it back at you Care Bear style.
- [35:11]
A
Nice, nice, nice. Care Bears 2 scared the heck out of me.
- [35:15]
B
Are you kidding? That green face in the book, that was some devil worship stuff, my friend. The way she, like. Oh. Basically bewitched that young boy, the young wizard's assistant. She bewitched him and kind of, like, lured him into her creepy caravan and. Yeah. No, no, thank you.
- [35:30]
A
Made him evil. He had debility.
- [35:32]
B
He sure did, Ben. You sure did. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.