Konjola

It was a vegetable concoction with a high alcohol content that could be sold without prescription and gave comfort to many who could not or would not find a bootlegger to ease the strictures of Prohibition.

Konjola sold like bathtub gin in the Roaring Twenties. Gilbert and Roberta started Mosby Medicine by mixing up tubs of Konjola in their basement and bottling it themselves. By 1927, Mosby owned a factory on Reading Road in Avondale and was planning an even bigger complex up the road. Mosby bought a spectacular neon sign, 84 feet long and 32 feet high, to advertise Konjola on the central pier of the Atlantic City boardwalk.

And then it all fell apart.

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Posted By: Paul - Mon Jan 29, 2024
Category: Regionalism | Patent Medicines, Nostrums and Snake Oil | 1920s | Alcohol

Comments

Thanks for a very interesting story. I like the claim that it contained no alcohol, when it seems that it contained lots of it. This seems to be a violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 which required drugs containing alcohol (and other addictive substances such as opiates) to list them on the label.

Posted by ges on 01/29/24 at 08:30 AM

I wouldn't take anything with those ingredients, alcoholic or not.

(Also, my usual nit-picking: who TF breaks "Ingre-dients" like that? That's more criminal than selling the stuff in the first place!)

Posted by Richard Bos on 02/03/24 at 03:18 PM

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