Mark Ford, an agent with Mississippi’s Alcoholic Beverage Control, could have lit a fire in his audience.
“I’m also a Baptist preacher,” he told McComb Lions Club members Tuesday. “We can talk about whiskey, or we can talk about Jesus.”
Ford stuck to whiskey and other alcoholic beverages along with the operations of the ABC, which was created in 1969 when the state allowed “local option” votes to allow the sale, purchase, possession and consumption of alcohol.
While the local option is allowed by the state, “technically, the state is still under Prohibition,” Ford said.
Yet, while essentially mandating Prohibition across the state anywhere that hasn’t specifically voted to allow some type of alcoholic beverages, the state also makes money from alcohol — not just in special taxes, but also by acting as the sole wholesaler of alcohol for licensed retailers. Beer and liquor are parceled out to retailers from a warehouse in Gluckstadt.
Retailers seeking to sell beer and liquor must have a separate license for each. Beer and light wine licenses are typically awarded fairly quickly and easily, Ford said, while liquor licenses take longer and require background checks on applicants.
Liquor stores can’t get beer licenses, and grocery and convenience stores can’t get liquor licenses, though Ford said bills pending in the Legislature this year could change that.
Unlicensed sales are illegal, as are out-of-state mail or online orders from and purchases made directly out of state and brought back by car.
“That’s contraband, technically,” Ford said.
Mississippi also still has dry counties, which have not had or have not passed a local-option referendum. In those counties, sale, purchase, consumption and possession of beer or alcohol are still illegal.
Mississippi’s laws have created a patchwork of localities that allow beer sales but not harder alcohol, harder alcohol but beer, both beer and alcohol or neither.
“ABC agents use common sense,” Ford said. “We look for bootleggers and people with large quantities of alcohol. We’re not going to come look in your fridge, even though the law says we can” in a dry county.
Then there’s resort status. A regular liquor license is allowed only in municipalities where liquor sales have been legalized. Resort status originally allowed liquor licenses outside city limits in wet counties where business owners could prove a tourist trade would benefit from the ability to sell liquor.
State law has since been amended to allow resort status to be granted to properties in dry counties.
One big problem ABC deals with is sales by bartenders or wait staff to customers who are visibly intoxicated. That is illegal under state law.
“The employee can be arrested,” Ford said. “The business’s permit can be revoked, and that would likely put them out of business. Imagine if that was the Beau Rivage ... It’s a big deal.”
Perhaps the biggest problem for ABC, however, is sales to minors using fake identification.
“We had 21 arrests in Hattiesburg Saturday for fake IDs,” Ford said. “A lot of these fake IDS are really good. You used to be able to tell the difference with the naked eye. Now it’s very difficult. Most of the IDS are coming from China.”
He said he used to pass out old IDs in training classes and ask students who had real IDs and who had fake ones. About half would say real, a few would say fake and some just didn’t know. “They were all fake,” he said.
He said beer or liquor sales made to minors with convincing IDs usually carry no penalty for the employee or the business where a fake ID is used, but the consequences are much more dire sometimes, with jail or license revocation on the table as it is for sales to the visibly intoxicated.
“Some employees don’t even check the IDs,” Ford said. “They just don’t care.”
