Prohibition laws were nearly impossible to enforce in any case because they were so riddled with loopholes. Doctors could legally prescribe whiskey for their patients, and they did so with such enthusiasm that by the late 1920s they were earning $40 million a year from the practice. In most cases, according to The New Yorker, the doctors simply handed out blank prescription slips. (In the week that Lindbergh flew to Paris, U.S. Prohibition commissioner James M. Doran authorized the production of an additional three million gallons of whiskey for medicine. When it was suggested that that was a
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