Denver declared liquor and pot stores non-essential on March 23, 2020. Chaos ensued.
In honor of the four-year anniversary of Denver's Prohibition panic, we're sharing this story by Conor McCormick-Cavanagh, the man who started it all:called a 2 p.m. press conference to announce that the City of Denver would be issuing a stay-at-home order because of the rising number of positive COVID-19 cases in Colorado.
“If you were a Budweiser drinker or vodka drinker, you were buying a couple cases, not just one or two, as you regularly would,” Vaughn adds. Inside the packed store, Heintzman says, he “grabbed a cardboard box, filled it with two boxes of wine and then whatever else I could carry: tequila, vodka, rum — things we don’t even drink. I left having spent about $200 and was feeling desperate that I didn’t get enough...so desperate that I called the mayor’s office when I got back home to let them know this was a ridiculous policy that had already backfired.
The goal of the stay-at-home-order was to slow the spread of COVID-19 by limiting close interactions between people, but the opposite was happening. But right after the press conference, Salazar began receiving text messages from pot- and liquor-industry stakeholders and lobbyists telling him that the city had made a mistake.
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