29 February—There’s legislation pending before the Connecticut General Assembly that would allow the state’s municipalities to ban the sale of so-called nips. The nips in this case are little plastic bottles of booze, usually containing about 50 milliliters (or cubic centimeters, if you prefer) of vodka, whose aroma doesn’t show up on boozers’ breath.

Digression: Contrary to common belief, liquor retailers aren’t known as package stores around here because booze purchases have to be packaged to conceal the contents from the eyes of the teetotaling public. Rather, hark back to the time when most distilleries and breweries sold their spiritous beverages in barrels and kegs. So a retailer would have to dispense the stuff into containers often supplied by the customer.

Then, in 1897, a federal judge ruled that if the booze was still in the “original packages”—i.e., the bottles—when sold by a wholesaler, it could then be sold in those bottles to retail consumers over the counter. The ruling didn’t stick, but the term did. And now in most places alcoholic beverages are available only in their original packages.

Back to nips, then, imagine what a nuisance it would be to fill them. Even from fifths or liters or whatever boozers use these days to fill their flasks. Anyway, should the anti-nip legislation pass, it’s doubtful the towns and cities would ban the sale of the little buggers—simply because there’s a five-cent tax on each nip sold, all of which eventually makes its way to the municipality where it was sold.

So at a hearing in the state Capitol yesterday Cynthia Chesky, co-founder of CT Towns Nixing the Nips, testified in favor of the legislation. With good reason. Because she claimed that in 14 months she had picked up some 62,000 discarded nips on daily walks through her Bristol neighborhood. Wow! 62,000 discarded nips! And that’s just from streets and lawns in her neighborhood in only 14 months.

Let’s do the arithmetic and assume Cynthia walks makes the rounds of her neighborhood every day, and every month has 31 days. That gives us 434 days. And that means she picks up an average of 142 nips a day. Bless her truly Herculean dedication and fortitude.

There’s no reason to doubt Cynthia’s veracity, especially since a couple of weeks ago she had brought several garbage bags containing about 4,000 discarded nips she’d collected in just a month to a Bristol City Council meeting.

In the half-century I’ve lived in inner city Litchfield I’ve picked up perhaps a handful of nips from streets and lawns. But the town has more than its fair share of clandestine problem boozers who discard their nips in other areas. Some probably dispose of them properly. But you’ve got to wonder about all the irresponsible boozers who live in Cynthia Chesky’s Bristol neighborhood.

In all events, adding a nickel to the price of nips was obviously intended by the whores of Hartford as a sop to municipalities rather than a solution to the nip-trash problem. Perhaps a refundable dime deposit on the pesky little bottles would be somewhat of an incentive for boozers to do the right thing. Banning the nips certainly would be futile for any number of reasons.

And no matter what may be suggested, the powerful booze industry is guaranteed to fight against it with all its might. But if Connecticut mandates dime deposits on plastic juice containers, it should also mandate dime—or even higher—deposits on wine and booze containers. It’s the fair thing to do, after all. And if package stores don’t like it, too bad . . .