Bringing Our Alcohol Laws To The 21st Century
A column by Gov. Dennis Daugaard:
When I speak with business prospects, I often praise our common sense regulatory environment. I emphasize that we don’t place unnecessary hurdles before our citizens or entrepreneurs in South Dakota. Success is allowed here and government doesn’t get in the way.
Until very recently though, this hasn’t been the case for microbreweries in South Dakota. Many of South Dakota’s laws on alcohol were designed right after prohibition ended, including our laws governing microbreweries. Our statutes capped microbrewery production at 5,000 barrels of beer per year. This is very small, compared to Montana’s cap of 60,000, Wyoming’s cap of 50,000 and North Dakota’s cap of 25,000. Iowa had no cap at all. South Dakota also did not allow a microbrewery to sell its product directly to a retailer while Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa did.
As of July 1, this is no longer the case. A bill I signed into law this past legislative session now allows microbreweries to produce up to 30,000 barrels of beer per year and they can also self-distribute their product. These updates will allow us to better compete with our surrounding states and help our homegrown craft breweries grow and thrive.
I also signed several other bills this year to modernize our alcohol statutes – some of which just went into effect at the beginning of this month as well. Two of these new laws allow farm wineries, distillers and microcideries to hold other types of retail licenses and operate at additional locations under the same privileges. Other laws streamlined regulations for wine manufacturers, provided greater flexibility for charitable events and eliminated the prohibition on using alcohol in some types of foods.
South Dakota’s alcohol laws were written over 80 years ago, during a very different era. I am glad we have streamlined and modernized our statutes, so that they make sense for a 21st Century economy. The new framework improves our already stellar business climate, and validates claims I’ve been making to our business prospects.
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How about the same thing with our marijuana laws.
How about you move to Colorado?
I’d rather stay here and laugh at you when our marijuana laws change. And they will change, sooner or later. Your side has lost; it’s only a matter of time.
doubt it.
1:53, We could probably use an absolute like – never. The people who are collecting signatures are stupid and can’t get petitions validated.
If dealers and their customers were using their brains, which is hard when in it’s in a state of arrest, they’d know that if MJ is legalized their customers would ditch them and prices would increase. There not very business savvy, but that makes sense when dealing with drug users.
Many of the potheads are those with unresolved personal issues and it shows and it negatively affects others. They just keep self medicating and don’t bother doing hard work of dealing with their issues.
Alcohol is a drug, a dangerous one. Look up the history of why marijuana is illegal, you might learn something.
Whataboutisms are not going to fly. Pot has it’s own unique issues & risks to health. We don’t need even more stoned drivers out there causing accidents and death.
* Auto insurance has gone up far more in states that legalized than surrounding states due to the increase of stoned drivers.
*The black market and illegal pot shops are doing extremely well in those legalized states and it is hurting the legal pot shops there.
*massive environmental damage due to toxic chemicals long banned for use here in the US used by gang operated illegal grow operations destined for legalized markets which undercuts prices of legal sales with the lack of overhead and no taxes charged & which will require millions to clean up at taxpayer expense.
* Shortage and lack of funding for increased demand for law enforcement to deal with above and increased crime which includes more back & brown getting arrested. Legalization advocates in those states claimed the opposite would happen.
* Increased teen use of pot in legalized states since legalization. All Denver metro pot shops which has one of the or the highest concentration of pot shops in the US refused to fill out the CDC survey which affected the study. Data manipulation is a common tool by the MJ industry.
* More HS dropouts in those states since legalization in the legal states too.
Around June 5th I asked a Democratic Legislative candidate if elected what were his priorities starting with #1 working on down that he would focus on.
#1 legalize recreational Marijuana. He told me that Colorado made so much money from legalizing pot they sent out rebate checks to all it’s residents. Knowing it was another pothead BS claim I immediately asked for a source. He stumbled and then said he did not have one.