How is Iran in the 2020s like the USA in the 1920s?

The picture below is of a few paragraphs from the book The Economics of Public Issues, which I often used as a supplemental textbook when I was teaching.

Now for modern day Iran. See See Alcohol Poisonings Rise in Iran, Where Bootleggers Defy a Ban by Farnaz Fassihi and Leily Nikounazar of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Iran’s prohibition of the drinking and selling of alcohol has led to a flourishing underground market. But even officials have acknowledged a wave of hospitalizations and deaths in recent months."

"Iranians . . . have found ways around the Islamic Republic’s longstanding ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol, which is punishable by a penalty of up to 80 lashes and fines."

"Rather than stopping drinking, the ban over time has led to a flourishing and dangerous bootleg market. In the past three months, a wave of alcohol poisonings has spread across Iranian towns big and small, with an average of about 10 cases per day of hospitalizations and deaths, according to official tallies in local news reports.

The culprit is methanol, found in homemade distilled alcohol and counterfeit brand bottles, apparently circulating widely"

"The clerical rulers who took power after the 1979 revolution, instituting a theocracy, banned the consumption and selling of alcohol in accordance with Islamic rules prohibiting intoxication. Religious minorities are exempt. Over the decades, reports of methanol contaminations occasionally surfaced, but not in the scope and frequency seen in recent months.

Even officials are now publicly acknowledging that the problem has escalated. Mehdi Forouzesh, Tehran’s chief coroner, said in a news conference in June that the number of hospitalizations and deaths from methanol poisoning had sharply risen. In only Tehran, he said, it had climbed by 36.8 percent since the beginning of March.

From the beginning of May until July 3, at least 309 people had been hospitalized and 31 had died from methanol poisoning, according to Iranian news reports. But the real number is likely much higher because many cases go unreported out of fear of retribution for breaking the law."

"644 people had died in 2022 from alcohol poisoning, a 30 percent rise from the previous year. Many victims permanently lost their eyesight."

"The police have discovered underground distilleries in a veterinary clinic, a roadside shack, a deodorant factory and abandoned warehouses. The business of bottled liquor can involve underground operations that pay scavengers to collect vodka and whiskey bottles from the trash to be filled with bootleg alcohol and sold as imported brand labels, according to interviews and media reports.

Experts say it is nearly impossible for an average consumer to detect deadly methanol, which does not smell or taste different from ethanol, in a drink. Home distillation increases the risk of methanol poisoning, they say, if the process is not carefully and properly executed."