Legal Weed

Here's another one of those cases of something that sounds like a good idea (or at least an innocuous one) at first glance, but very rapidly turns out to be more complicated than you'd expect. It happens that Federal law (which governs most aspects of the brewing and distilling industries) prohibits drug references on the packaging of alcoholic beverages. You might think this would be a good idea, in that it would prevent the liquor industry from trying to use the appeal of various controlled substances to sell a product that would almost certainly end up being abused in its own right. Unfortunately, once you allow any regulation to restrict free speech, the matter will almost always become more complicated than you wanted it to be...

Take the case of Legal Weed beer, made by the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company in Weed, California. The town of Weed has been enjoying the double entendre of its name for over a century now, with everything from T-shirts that play on the name to a sign at the city limits that reads "Temporarily Out of Weed." A famous tourist spot is the road sign that has "Weed" with an arrow pointing left, and "College" with an arrow pointing right (people like to get their picture taken in front of the sign). It's all made even funnier by the fact that the town is actually named for its founder, Abner Weed, a local lumber baron and state senator. No one is actually advocating the sale, possession or use of marijuana (often known by the slang term of "weed"), and everyone knows it...

Everyone, that is, except for the Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which earlier this year ordered the brewery to stop marketing the "Legal Weed" beer that they had begun selling. Apparently unable to see the humor in the situation, the Feds threatened all sorts of civil and criminal sanctions, and only backed down when the huge storm of negative public opinion reached a crescendo. Video segments about this David-and-Goliath fight appeared on the news across the U.S. and as far away as Saudi Arabia, and over 1,400 supporters sent letters or emails to the brewery owner, urging him to stay in the fight. Eventually the Bureau, sensing the enormous potential for bad publicity and a lengthy trial reversed its position...


But not before sales of all of the brewing company's products (not just the "Legal Weed") had more than doubled. We've often been told that there is no such thing as "bad" publicity; anything that puts your company into the public eye is automatically a good thing, no matter how negative the circumstances behind it might be. Based on the events in this story, it might be true. But a much more immediate question is whether anyone else out there is considering launching an alcoholic beverage product with a drug reference in the name, and whether this story will convince them to go ahead and take the same risks, or rename the product "White Rabbit Lager" or something equally inoffensive...

And whether letting Federal agencies suspend a constitutional right just because they think it MIGHT help to suppress crime and/or drug abuse is a good idea in the first place...