Article from Reason by Baylen Linnekin.
A 150-year-old Florida law that prohibits the addition of a common spice to liquor is at the center of a lawsuit against the maker of a popular gin.
The class-action lawsuit against Bacardi, which owns Bombay Sapphire, claims the liquor giant adds “grains of paradise”—a spice banned under an archaic Florida law—to its bestselling gin. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Miami this past summer and the subject of a lengthy piece in the Miami Herald this week, also names Winn-Dixie, a Florida-based grocery chain that sells Bombay Sapphire, as a defendant.
The Florida law, § 562.455, declares that “[w]hoever adulterates, for the purpose of sale, any liquor, used or intended for drink, with… grains of paradise… or any other substance which is poisonous or injurious to health, and whoever knowingly sells any liquor so adulterated, shall be guilty of a felony of the third degree.”
That’s comparable in severity to armed trespassing. Those found guilty of a third-degree felony in Florida face up to five years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Looks like I need to goto Winn-Dixie and buy a bottle. If I get there fast enough. I remember when “Banned in Boston” was an automatic best seller.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
The suit will remove this “law” from the books, so, a good thing.
The nuts are loose in Florida – somebody had WAY too much time on their hands to dig that deep! Definitely looking for deep pockets, though… look who they’re suing…
They drank too much of this gin