OHLQ Puts Out Press Release 'Don't Participate in Secondary Sales'

In what reads like an press release from The Onion, The Ohio Division of Liquor Control has advised consumers NOT to participate in secondary liquor sales. These are sales that "often occur on the internet including on social media websites such as Facebook and other sites such as Craigslist. Typically, sellers will purchase bottles of liquor and turn around to resell them."

The press release notes that in the entire year of 2021, The Ohio Division of Liquor Control and the Ohio Investigative Unit issued 34 referrals resulting in 32 warnings and two arrests... This is actually down from 2020 when there were 50 referrals, zero arrests, and 47 warnings... so to put that into prospective... in two full calendar years... there have been 79 warnings and two arrests. This tells me if you want to resell in Ohio, you basically have carte blanche because the entire department issues less than 1 warning a month and averages 1 arrest a year... sounds like a great use of taxpayer money. 

Even more comical is this quote from Division Superintendent Jim Canepa:

We appreciate the efforts OIU takes to keep the market fair and consumers safe, Ohio consumers who purchase their liquor the right way support small businesses that sell these products legally and avoid buying counterfeit or tampered with products.

This is ridiculous on so many levels... the fact that you'd be supporting small business when most of the OHLQ stores are embedded in Fortune 500 grocery stores or that there is a huge market of counterfeit or tampered with products, and arresting 2 people in the last two years has suddenly solved this imaginary problem.

The reality is that Ohio has ridiculous liquor laws that inhibit small businesses from being able to enter the market or even small distillers from being able to sell their products because everything has to be approved, bought, and allocated by OHLQ. This press release also tells me they aren't even trying to care about the secondary sales issue. 

If The Ohio Division of Liquor Control and the Ohio Investigative Unit gave a single F, they could do the simplest of Facebook searches and find things like this... but instead, there is the bare minimum of appearances so they can keep the status quo to keep funneling money to Jobs Ohio (that's where the liquor profits go) which can give giant corporate subsidies. 

What Should Be Done? 

I've written numerous times about how dumb our liquor laws are in Ohio. I'd love to see stores be able to stock whatever liquor products they want and let the market dictate supply and demand. This would be better for Ohio because there would be more sales, thus more taxes, and it would be better for consumers because there would be better products. 

Since it doesn't seem like there is a lot of traction for changing the way liquor is distributed in Ohio, there are other things that can be done... first and foremost... start cracking down on the people who camp out ahead of time for limited releases and then turn around and resell them immediately. This does two things, it keeps the people who actually want the product from getting it, and it creates an untaxed black market. 

The other thing is to legalize bourbon shipments into Ohio. They are already happening as I have sooo many friends who have bottles delivered all the time. Ohio gets zero tax money from this and this is much more likely to have counterfeits than some random dude on Facebook. 

Anyway, based on the press release, do what you want with impunity... because the State surely isn't going to do anything. 

You can read the entire press release here. 

What do you think? Drop a note in the comments below.