Oregon’s Pappy Van Winkle scandal follows scarce bourbon, low prices

From The Oregonian:

…Oregon’s also ripe for exploitation due to the limited number of people with access to information about products as they move through the system and into stores.

“This almost becomes like a form of insider trading in some ways, where there’s people with specialized knowledge about where these products are going and when they’ll be there before anyone else has it,” said Jarrett Dieterle, a resident senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based R Street Institute, a free market think tank. “And they’re able to take advantage of that…”

That the distribution center manager served as the apparent gatekeeper to the state’s liquor supply underscores the system’s vulnerability, experts said.

“They literally emailed one poor person that was overseeing this whole thing and you kind of feel for her,” said Dieterle, the think tank analyst. “She controls all this and that creates a setup for these pretty powerful power brokers to be reaching out to get access.”