Federalist Society Documents ‘American Spirit’ of U.S. Distilling

Our friends at the Federalist Society have a great new short film out about the history of alcohol regulation, from the last days of Prohibition to the new profusion of craft distilleries in recent years.

The producers of American Spirit made the always-smart decision to include my colleague Angela Logomasini among the experts they interviewed. Angela has written for many years about consumer health and chemical risk, and has been fighting for smarter regulation of everything from agricultural pesticides to micro-bead cosmetics. She even takes on entities like the World Health Organization when they publish misleading research findings on children’s health. She does a great job here of explaining how current alcohol regulations further government control and cronyism rather than consumer welfare.

This new film might remind you of CEI’s own film I, Whiskey: The Human Spirit, which was screened across the country in 2017, from Mississippi’s Oxford Film Festival to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California as part of the Silicon Valley International Film Festival. This popularity shouldn’t be surprising—alcohol is both a popular product that’s bound up with positive emotions and cherished memories for many of us, but also a heavily-regulated item with a checkered history of legality that makes it a perfect example of the strange outcomes that the American legal and regulatory system often generate.