Credit: Dangerous Minds

I’ve been teetotal since I was 15 years old. There’s no grand history behind it other than I never liked the taste of any booze, from beer to wine to alcopops, and hated what it did to my friends, but it’s a lifestyle I’ve stuck to ever since and have no interest in ever deviating from. I tell you this so you understand just what it means when I say that prohibition laws are bullshit.

I don’t smoke or drink, and the hardest drug I’ll ever take is caffeine, yet prohibiting the sale or imbibement of any of them is functionally impossible to do. Just look at the infamous American prohibition period from 1920 to 1930. All it did was take the ludicrously lucrative alcohol trade and force it underground, where more money changed hands for less regulated, worse quality product, and went directly into the hands of some of the worst, most crooked people imaginable and funded some truly heinous acts.

These are all arguments that stand today with the thriving illegal drug trade, yet the process of legalising them is a long, arduous one that looks as if it’s going to take countless decades, if not centuries, to achieve. However, these things do end, and it’s worth remembering that no matter how long it takes, there will be a day when the tide turns in favour of common sense. It might just take many, many more years than anyone would assume to get there.

There have even been countries where the prohibition of alcohol seemed like something that would never end. Perhaps this was alleviated somewhat by the fact that it was (if this can even be the case) a rather more relaxed ban on booze than most other countries ever implemented. It began as a blanket ban on alcohol, but within two decades had been relaxed into a single drink. You could have wine, you could have spirits, but one important option remained illegal.

Because let’s be real here, for most people, a ban on beer is a ban on alcohol in general.

What country banned beer in 1915?

Asking which country was behind this beer ban leads to a strange answer, because it’s one that should be more progressive than that. At least on the surface. After all, the country that gave us Björk should be one with more of an eye on the future than that, but Iceland is nothing if not a confounding place. After all, this wasn’t a ban enforced by a puritanical government to mass public outcry, but one that was put in place as a direct response to the will of the people.

In 1908, the Icelandic government put the decision to vote, asking the public whether they wanted to outlaw alcohol in their country. After 60% of the voting populace said yes, the prohibition was put into effect in 1915. However, they reassessed in a matter of years. Wine was put back on the menu in 1922. Spirits came along a little later in 1935, but beer remained strictly forbidden for nearly the entire rest of the century.

This was partially due to puritanical, classist logic about the effect that cheap beer has on the underclass, but there was also another, more important reason that beer was outlawed for so long – up until 1944, Iceland was an associated territory of Denmark, which was a cute way of saying that Iceland was under Danish rule, and the Danes loved their beer even more than the rest of mainland Europe did, thus, drinking beer was seen as coloniser behaviour.

Thus, beer remained outlawed until nearly 75 years after the initial prohibition was put into law. Eventually, the ban was fully repealed on March 1st, 1989, and March 1st is celebrated in Iceland to this day as Beer Day. One can only imagine how they pass the time on Beer Day, since no one seems to remember it very well.

Funny, that.