The Ministry of Sound opened in London, in 1991, the first major nightclub without an alcohol license. It didn’t need one to be commercially viable, since the main intoxicant on offer was the then fashionable narcotic, ecstacy. People would buy water and soft drinks at inflated prices. This was common knowledge, and to suggest otherwise would be incredibly naive or deceitful. Today it is a $150M company with 120 employees and a legal team.
I am making no judgement about that, but its pretty ironic to see an interview with their ‘head of legal’, Victoria Davies, in The Lawyer. Of course we have seen this hybrid of party culture and what used to be conservative, elsewhere – in banking.