Changes to Pa. liquor law make a lot of sense

So you're in line at the grocery store. The kick-off to the big game is just minutes away. You plunk your three six-packs down for payment. And the cashier's face creases.

Sorry, he or she tells you, under state law, you can only buy two six-packs at a time. If you want that third one, you're going to have to buy two, bring them out to your car, and then come back inside to buy the third one.

Or, say for instance, there's a spirit or wine that you happen to love, and, by happenstance, it's not available in Pennsylvania. Under state law, you can't have it shipped to you.

And because of another legal quirk, if you hop across the border to buy it, you're a bootlegger because you're dodging the 24 percent tax the state Liquor Control Board levies on the sale of wine and spirits.

As PennLive's Charles Thompson pointed out last week, there are plenty of head-scratchers in the thicket of legal language dictating how Pennsylvania regulates the sale of wine and spirits.

So we welcome an effort by state Rep. John Taylor, R-Philadelphia, who wants the state to stop making criminals out of otherwise law-abiding Pennsylvanians who might skip across the border into New Jersey or Maryland to pick up a bottle or two of their favorite vino or hooch for their own consumption.

"I don't want my constituents to be subject to being criminals ... for having a bottle of wine," Taylor, the chairman of the House Liquor Control Committee, said last week.

Under current law, violators caught bringing in alcohol from out-of-state stores are subject to a fine of $10 a bottle or can of beer and $25 per bottle of liquor. That's in addition to whatever you paid for it in the first place.

And, adding insult to injury, police will confiscate the offending booze too.

Wendell Young, the head of Local 1776 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents state store employees, told Thompson that it's unfair to state employees for lawmakers to encourage more out-of-state liquor shopping without giving the state stores a better chance to compete. Despite the fact that Young's union has been one of the single, biggest impediments to reform efforts, he has something of a point.

If there is one signal failure of the past legislative session, it has been the Legislature's complete inability to modernize the way Pennsylvania sells wine, spirits and beers to legal adults.

From outright efforts at divestiture of the state-run monopoly to mere attempts to make consumers' lives easier by allowing wine sales in grocery stores, liquor reformers have seen their attempts stymied by well-organized opponents in industry, organized labor and the temperance movement.

As we have noted so many times before, other states have managed to expand alcohol sales and ... perish forbid ... even make it easier for adults to purchase legal beverage without their becoming a Sodom and Gomorrah of the Lower 48. Only one other state Utah exerts such strict control over the sale of alcoholic beverages.

Rep. Taylor's proposal, along with other modernization proposals, deserves a fair airing. Given their past incompetence on this issue, it may be too much to hope that lawmakers will accomplish something during the handful of days they're in session this fall.

That would be indeed something to toast at year's end.

PennLive.com