Higher Ed | Daily Report

Flickr photo by Ian Sutherland

A couple of years ago, officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison went after the local Walgreens drugstore for a display that advertised most of the paraphernalia necessary to play the ubiquitous college drinking game of beer pong.

The offending display included plastic cups and ping pong balls but was noticeably missing one important ingredient: the booze. Walgreens didn't have a liquor license. Still, that didn't make much of a difference to UW-Madison's dean of students Lori Berquam, who had been helping lead an effort to reduce binge drinking at the campus ranked No. 3 party school (specifically, "best beer-drinking school") by Playboy magazine.  

The display is marketed in a predominantly first-year student area, very few of whom are 21," Berquam said to the Badger Herald. "And the display was obviously indicating something to do with alcohol."

Now, the five Madison-area Walgreens stores are seeking licenses to sell beer and wine as part of the drugstore chain's nationwide campaign to become more of a one-stop shopping destination. The push includes three Walgreens locations in the city of Berkeley, including one at the western edge of UC Berkeley campus, at 2187 Shattuck Ave., one at 2801 Adeline St. and one at 1051 Gilman St., said Robert Nicholas, attorney representing Walgreen Co. in California. Altogether, the company is seeking licenses for more than 500 stores in the state.

UC Berkeley officials said it was too early to weigh in on the license for the Shattuck store because the university had not received any information about Walgreens' plans. So far, paperwork has been filed but hearing dates have yet to be set, Nicholas said.

In Madison, the Alcohol License Review Committee voted to deny two of the Walgreens licenses and delayed decision on the other three, according to Isthmus magazine. Here in Berkeley, Nicholas' firm helped organize a June 29 meeting to discuss the licenses with the community. Based on feedback from people concerned about loitering in the neighborhood surrounding the Adeline Walgreens, company officials decided that store would sell alcohol only until 8 p.m., when the nearby Berkeley Bowl closes, Nicholas said.  

The company is targeting the customer who pops in for a few quick groceries and might want to grab a bottle of California wine or a six-pack of beer while they're at it, Nicholas said. Responding to concerns from local police, Walgreens won't be selling some of the more obvious products for achieving drunkeness – such as hard liquor, malt liquor, individual bottles or cans of beer or high-alcohol-content sweet wines like Thunderbird.

Walgreens decided against pursuing licenses at store locations the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control would not approve because of a combination of a high number of alcohol licenses in the area and high crime rates. That's why the chain is not applying to sell beer and wine at its other two Berkeley locations on Telegraph Avenue and San Pablo Avenue, Nicholas said.

In a way, the move to sell beer and wine harkens back to the Illinois-based drugstore chain's early years, when according to Daniel Okrent, author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition," the company had a major growth spurt fueled by selling "medicinal" liquor during the Prohibition era.

Shortly after the Volstead Act banned alcohol with an exception for medical use, America's doctors concluded in an industry survey that "alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating 27 separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snake bite, lactation problems and old age," Okrent wrote in a recent column. Pharmacists, including Charles Walgreen, took notice:

In Chicago, druggist Charles Walgreen saw his chain expand from 20 stores in 1920 to a staggering 525 a decade later. Along the way, Walgreens introduced the milkshake, which family historians have credited with the chain's rocketing expansion. But it's doubtful that milkshakes alone were responsible. Something Charles Walgreen Jr. told an interviewer many years later suggests another possibility. The elder Walgreen worried about fire breaking out in his stores, his son recalled, but this apprehension extended beyond an understandable concern for the safety of his employees: He "wanted the fire department to get in as fast as possible and get out as fast as possible," Charles Jr. remembered, "because whenever they came in, we'd always lose a case of liquor from the back.