In Abalama, liquor sales are regulated by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (ABC Board).

This is from their website:

ABC Board Successfully Operates During Pandemic; Sets Financial Milestone

ABC Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 gross revenues for retail, wholesale and military liquor sales was $596.1 million while FY 2019 gross revenues were $531.2 million which resulted in a retail sales increase of $64.9 million.

Despite ABC temporarily closing 78 retail stores last March and reassigning those employees to open stores, to seeing its warehouse staffing shrink 27% as the pandemic continued from summer to fall, the agency shipped 3,304,241 cases of liquor in FY 2020.

In FY 2019, ABC shipped 332,022 fewer cases while the agency operated at full capacity.

So people sitting at home with nothing to do, many having lost jobs, turned to alcohol.  The result was a nearly 10% increase in alcohol consumption.

This was not spread out evenly among the population.  We know that some people really hit the sauce hard because of the anxiety and depression from 2020.

We paid for possibly preventing some people from getting COVID by making sure others would suffer liver damage and alcoholism.

I don’t believe that the cost to society to try and “slow the spread” for a year – which has been an utter failure  – is worth what we got for our efforts.