I grew up and live in Arkansas. Dry counties have always been a part of my life. My first college experience was in Ouachita County county and its usually dry. I say usually because they constantly have local elections on the issue. It flips back and forth between wet & dry. The liquor stores don’t even give up their leases. They just close for a year or two until the county goes wet again. You can’t even buy a beer in a dry county.
It’s a PITA living in a dry county. There’s always liquor stores on the nearest county line. Usually no more than 30 minutes away. You have to be very careful to only buy a small amount. A 12 pack of beer or a single bottle of booze. Any more and the cops will bust your ass for trafficking. They keep a close eye on the roads near the county line stores. Some store owners have been known to sell some idiot 6 cases of beer and then call the cops as soon as they leave. The cops will be parked on the highway waiting for you a few miles inside the dry county.
Thankfully I currently live in my states capital and its in a wet county.
I had no idea Arkansas had this many dry counties. :rolleyes: This is the first complete list I’ve ever seen. I was I could find one that broke it down by county names.
Some Native villages in Alaska vote themselves dry from time to time, when crime gets out of hand. Those long winters in an isolated location take a toll. People get caught every so often trying to smuggle in hard liquor to make a profit. Obviously, a quart of hooch is going to go for a lot of money in that situation.
Is it actually illegal to bring in alcohol for personal or family use, or is it just that cops generally let small amounts slide and only bother to bust when it’s a significant amount?
I don’t know of whole dry counties around here (central Illinois) but plenty of towns still uphold prohibition. In these cases there’s always a crappy supermarket just outside the town boundaries that makes all its profit on booze.
I “think” its legal to bring in beer & hard liquor for personal use. The grey area is what that amount is. You can’t make a beer run for family & friends. Multiple cases could get you busted.
I haven’t lived in a dry county since my early twenties. Back then I was too broke to buy more than a couple six packs.
They’re protecting their liquor license. They don’t want the ABC after them.
I once spent five days deep in Grand Gulch in Southern Utah. It’s a primitive area with very little surface water (at the time of year I was there.) Every morning we had to hike get to water, use a hand pump filter to make it safe to drink, and drink what we had very sparingly throughout the day. Repeat at night.
As we climbed up and out of the canyon on the last day, every fiber of my being was crying out for a cold beer. We had to drive for about 30 minutes to the nearest town, but no beer in the convenience stores and none of the restaurants served it either. It was not technically a dry county, just that nobody carried it. I did have the best gallon of caffeine free diet coke ever, though.
I started whitewater paddling in Arkansas on the Big Piney near Dover which is near Russellville. Dry. When I first started going there I was amazed that there were still dry places in the US. We used to go to Russellville and there was a bar there but you had to be a member, so one person in our group would join for like 20 bucks and then the rest of us would be “guests” and pay like 5 bucks. We’d split the total cost up amongst us. Lots of fun times, but each year we got reminded that the locals didn’t much like river hippies chattin’ up thier gals!
I haven’t been down that way in years but I’ve heard that the local law enforcement views alchohol busts as a revenue stream and targets boaters and others at the campgrounds for alchohol violations. It is technically illegal in the parks but it was always tolerated back in the day as long as you didn’t cause problems.
After Prohibition was repealed didn’t control of liquor sales revert back to the states? Thats why we have such different rules state by state. Its amazing we don’t have at least one state that bans liquor entirely. Just like Prohibition did on a National level.
WTF? I am currently visiting Houston, and the Kroger’s next door has aisles and aisles of wine, as does the CVS next door to the Kroger’s. Maybe they can’t sell alcohol on Sunday? I dunno, but for a “partially dry” county, this place seems awfully wet.
On the up-side, until very recently in wet counties you could drink and drive as long as you weren’t on a state highway. County roads and less were ok. It wasn’t unusual for my cousins and I to grab a case of roadies and go bombing along the back roads hunting varmits.
I live in Arkansas (I used to live in dry Grant County) and I’ve never heard of police arresting someone for transporting alcohol within state lines. Do you have a cite for this? So far as I know, there is no county in Arkansas where it is illegal to possess alcohol.
Word.
Dry counties are as weird to me as little green aliens.
We’ve got a dry city close to us, but that whole town is populated by hardcore 7th Dayers. They even fought against McDonald’s coming into their community because they find them so offensive. :rolleyes: