 COVID-19 has come through and completely decimated and put on pause the bar and restaurant industry. We've got about eight million people out of work and bar and restaurant owners struggling to come up with new ways to possibly stay in business. I'm Jacob Greer. I work in the bar hospitality business and I'm also a freelance writer. I write for Reason Magazine as well as other public policy outlets. Talking to other people in the industry, talking to bartenders, they want two things. One, they want to go back to work, but they also want to stay safe. And it's really hard to do both at the same time if the only option is for people to come into a bar or a restaurant and to gather inside. We're seeing it's just a recipe for spreading the virus. So we don't want to end up in a cycle of reopening and then re-closing constantly, which we're seeing right now. We'd like to find something that's more stable. Talking to people in my industry, the number one item on their wish list is to be free to sell cocktails to go. They want to be able to package a drink up to go alongside their food or even by itself for a customer to take home and drink there. The other quick ideas would be to expand outdoor spaces for drinking, which could be through closing sidewalks, putting on tables, even closing down on highest streets and creating public social plazas. Or if you want to go all the way there, eliminating open container laws entirely so that it's no longer a crime to have a drink outside. So in much of the world, especially in Asia and other parts of Europe, it's not against the law. It's not a crime to be outside drinking. And that was the case in the United States as well. From most of our history, it was not a crime simply to drink in public. It was a crime to be drunk in public. And that's a key distinction. In the 1970s, there became this push to make the law less discretionary, more objective. And the way they did that was to say the act of drinking itself is now the crime. And that highly constrained where people could drink. When we think of open containers, we think of party atmospheres like Las Vegas or Bourbon Street in New Orleans. But there's also a lot more relaxed places that have varying degrees of open container permission, like say Hood River in Oregon or Sonoma in California. It doesn't have to be a party atmosphere, especially if you don't force everyone into one narrow space. It could be just allowing people to have a drink in the park, to have a picnic, to walk around their neighborhood with a drink in hand. And prohibition happened in 1920. And contrary to popular image of the fun speakeasy with great cocktails, what actually happened was we just spoiled our cocktail culture in the United States through that period. And we didn't really recover until the early 2000s, up until now. And all of this has been hugely hit by the shutdown. Right now I view these laws about allowing us to do cocktails to go and expanding outdoor spaces as much about damage control as anything else. And to prevent this from being completely erased and giving it some chance to survive.