07 May Do You Have a Prescription for that Whiskey?
In the twenty-first century, we like to imagine that we’ve created everything. Every idea is new, every exception to the rule is new, too. So when Illinois created a medical marijuana card and immediately began arguing about what conditions might qualify for the illegal pain-reliever, Prohibition-era pharmacists likely just rolled over in their graves. Been there, done that.
Three years before Prohibition attempted to dry out America, the American Medical Association issued a resolution marginalizing the medicinal qualities of alcohol. It really didn’t help prevent infectious diseases, cure migraines (maybe created some, but didn’t cure them), and largely had no role within “modern” American medicine. Once Prohibition became the law, though, doctors and pharmacists with an entrepreneurial spirit reversed course and started issuing prescriptions for just about every form of alcohol, except beer. (They tried, but Congress quickly passed the Willis-Campbell Act, better known as the “Emergency Beer Bill.”) But whiskey, gin, brandy were determined to cure or mitigate twenty-seven medical ailments, including such things as toothaches, pneumonia, high blood pressure, and depression. Each prescription, allegedly, was issued for a small amount of 100 proof alcohol that you had to purchase at the pharmacy. Medicinal bottles even came with handy dosage cups affixed to the top so you could never accidentally overserve yourself. True story, the concept was so successful that Charles Walgreen expanded his small pharmacy chain from twenty stores to five hundred twenty-five stores during the era of Prohibition. He later claimed it was due to the popularity of the store’s milkshakes. Maybe they were mudslide milkshakes?
Like most everything, those with means were often prescribed far more doses than those without. For example, when struck by a car during a Prohibition-era visit to the United States, Winston Churchill’s pharmacist prescribed an indefinite quantity of alcohol,, “especially at mealtimes” for the man much in need of a drink during his visit.
In theory, police and the feds were monitoring the doctors and the pharmacists, but they were badly outnumbered and often far too busy chasing the gangster bootleggers on the mean streets of Chicago. Some pharmacists even sold their government-issued prescription forms to the gangsters themselves, cutting out the middle man doctors.
It’s remarkable how far we have not progressed as a society. We create laws just to create exceptions that swallow the rule, or the dosage. Hats off to the pharmacists and doctors, though, which saw the opportunity to cash in on bad laws and fill the public demand for a drink. Even if it meant reversing their iron-clad 1917 resolution, they found their niche and Mr. Walgreen is still doing okay even though we don’t need prescriptions for liquor anymore.
You don’t have to fake indigestion anymore to get a drink in Chicago, thank God! But it’s a little nostalgic to imagine what lengths we all might have gone through in 1920-something Prohibition. Would you have begged for a prescription? Or just gone to medical school?
Written by Amy Williams