The following table of alcohol laws of the United States provides an overview of alcohol-related laws by state throughout the US. This list is not intended to provide a breakdown of such laws by local jurisdiction within a state; see that state's alcohol laws page for more detailed information.
As of July 1988, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had a minimum purchase age of 21, with some grandfather clauses. Prior to 1988, the minimum purchase age varied by jurisdiction. After Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in July 1984, states not in compliance had a portion of their federal highway funding withheld. South Dakota and Wyoming were the final two states to comply, in mid-1988.
Unlike on the mainland, the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have a minimum purchase age of 18. The minimum purchase age is 21 in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.
U.S. military reservations are exempt under federal law from state, county and locally enacted alcohol beverage laws. Class Six stores in a Base Exchange facility, an Officers' and/or NCO clubs as well as other military commissaries which are located on a military reservation may sell and serve alcohol beverages at anytime during their prescribed hours of operation to authorized patrons¹.
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“Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal-passers—all.”
—Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)
“Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“As a Tax-Paying Citizen of the United States I am entitled to a voice in Governmental affairs.... Having paid this unlawful Tax under written Protest for forty years, I am entitled to receive from the Treasury of “Uncle Sam” the full amount of both Principal and Interest.”
—Susan Pecker Fowler (1823–1911)
“Sean Thornton: I don’t get this. Why do we have to have you along. Back in the states I’d drive up, honk the horn, a gal’d come runnin’ out.
Mary Kate Danaher: Come a runnin’. I’m no woman to be honked at and come a runnin’.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“In the Corner Store, near the village center, hangs a large sign reading: ‘After 40 years of credit business, we have closed our book of Sorrow.’”
—For the State of Maine, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)