I lived in a dry county for 3 months and let me tell you: it is a DIFFERENT America from the rest of America.
(I’m posting from my phone and at work, but I am going to come back to this and talk more about my experience living in a dry county)
Okay, let me tell you about my time living in a dry county.
A dry town or a dry county is a town or county that has banned the sale of alcohol. This doesn't mean that no alcohol is allowed in the town, it just means that it cannot be legally sold or bought within the town. A dry town is a town that still has prohibition laws.
Prohibition was repealed on a federal level in 1933, however, counties or individual towns can still keep and enforce prohibition on a local level. These laws aren't consistent between all places that maintain prohibition.
For example, the county I lived in the law was that no business could sell alcohol within 500 feet of a church or school.
The county didn't have many schools, but ya know what it did have a lot of? Churches. Lots of them. On every block.
The law can say no sale within 500 feet from a church, but when there's a church ever 100 feet, that basically means, no sales of alcohol at all.
Alcohol is now forbidden fruit, that makes it dangerous and exciting and anyone teenager who can boast that they have drunk alcohol, or regularly drink alcohol becomes a school legend. Instead of protecting children from the "evils" of alcohol, it just motivates them to seek and consume it more. In the three months I lived there, most of the car accidents I learned of were from teenagers driving drunk. Usually I learned of these accidents in the context of a scandalized adult gossiping about it at the general store-gas station-restaurant (it was all one building, I lived in a very small town).
The county's law was very specifically about the sale of alcohol, it said nothing about driving across the county line and buying alcohol to bring back with you. But driving to another county could be a trek if you weren't already living near the county line. In this way, beer became an informal currency. I hired a guy to paint my porch and literally paid him in a six-pack of Coors. This man did what in any rational place, would have been $150-$200 worth of labor for one six-pack of cheap beer.
(There were also bootleggers and drug addicts, but I didn't live there long enough to meet them.)
Anyway, Smallville is a dry town, it cannot be as wholesome and clean as most Superman adaptations make it out to be. Clark must personally know at least 5 classmates who died in a drunk driving accident. If Ma and Pa let him have a small after-school job ever, Clark must have been offered beer as payment at least once.
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