The Prohibition Hangover

Bartender, please … that new-fangled Old-Fashioned with a chaser of history … 


Spirits are all the rage today. Two-thirds of American adults drink, and simple sips of beer, wine, or traditional cocktails have morphed into designer dollops of extreme brews and extremely provocative blends. From fine dining and piano bars to baseball games and backyard barbeques, drinks are part of the social occasion.


In the book The Prohibition Hangover, Garrett Peck explores the often-contradictory social history of alcohol in America, from the end of Prohibition in 1933 to the twenty-first century.  For Peck, Repeal left American society wondering whether alcohol is a consumer product or a controlled substance, an accepted staple of social culture or a danger to society.  Today the legal drinking age, binge drinking, the neoprohibitionist movement, the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Granholm v. Heald that rejected discriminatory curbs on wine sales, the health benefits of red wine, advertising, and other issues remain highly contested.

Based on primary research, including hundreds of interviews with those on all sides—clergy, bar and restaurant owners, public health advocates, citizen crusaders, industry representatives, and more—as well as secondary sources, The Prohibition Hangover provides a panoramic assessment of alcohol in American culture.  Traveling through the California wine country, the beer barrel backroads of New England and Pennsylvania, and the blue hills of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, Peck places the concerns surrounding alcohol use within the broader context of American history, religious traditions, and governance.

Society is constantly evolving, and so are our drinking habits. Cutting through the froth and shedding the maraschino cherries, The Prohibition Hangover examines the modern American temperament towards drink amid the $189 billion dollar a year industry that defines itself by the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

This is an entirely independent book.  The author neither solicited nor received funding from the alcoholic beverage industry or the industry watchdogs.  The research, analysis, and conclusions are his own.