Joplin, (Missouri) and Boston, Massachusetts, don’t have much in common, but they do have one similarity. KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.
Both communities are considering banning those mini bottles of liquor that you see at grocery and liquor stores when you're checking out.
The city council in Boston last month discussed banning both 100 and 50-ml liquor bottles.
For now, residents in Joplin and council members have focused on banning only the 50-ml bottles.
Joplin Business owner LaNetta Lewis spoke in opposition of a possible ban at the city council meeting Monday.
She says if customers want to purchase 50 ml bottles of alcohol, they’ll just drive or walk to a neighboring community where it's legal.
"Your scope is on the city limits of Joplin. Joplin is this big.
You can go from this building in any direction five minutes be outside the city limits of Joplin.
Where you can buy them. It’s there ban in Joplin.
They're just going to go five minutes away and buy them."
Two cities near Boston, Chelsea and Newton, Massachusetts banned the sale of small bottles of liquor in 2019.
As a result, the number of alcohol-related emergency calls in Chelsea, Mass., dropped from 720 in 2015 to just 216 in 2020, a year after the ban was put in place.
The Joplin city council took no action on a proposed 50-ml bottle ban on Monday night.
