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This week, state law enforcement officials discovered and decommissioned an operation that produces an illegal substance just outside of Eufaula.

If you’re thinking methamphetamine, you’re wrong. Turn back the calendar several decades and think about jugs marked XXX by raggedy men with coonskin caps and corncob pipes.

Yes, it was a makeshift distillery creating moonshine, a high-octane beverage more often associated with Prohibition than modern times. It’s apparently a bigger problem in Alabama today than many would imagine.

Just as the attorney general’s office formed a task force to eradicate illegal gambling, the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board mounted a Moonshine Task Force last fall, and agents have since discovered and destroyed 17 stills and seized 470 gallons of moonshine. About the same time, the ABC Board licensed the first legal distillery in Alabama since Prohibition, a Bullock County operation called High Ridge Spirits, which produces a whiskey called Stills Crossroads Alabama ‘Shine.