US Government poisoned alcohol during prohibition

[randomname]

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188

[FreeTraveler]

And who can forget Paraquat Pot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat)?

The government has no qualms about killing people to get what it wants. Never has, never will have.

[FrankRep]

Alcohol poisoning was an inside job!

:)

[Roxi]

I just read this and went to post it and found this thread through a search... I can hardly believe it only got a couple of responses....

From the article:


Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920 but people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.


Sounds a lot like the drug war huh?

[Sola_Fide]

Prohibition was the result of a few things:

1. The female suffrage movement

2. Men off at war, so they couldn't vote

3. The rise of the social gospel ("christian" socialism).


Basically women who misinterpreted the Bible were largely responsible for alcohol prohibition.

[crhoades]

http://hockeypage.com/hockeypage/punishment/standings.nsf/Teams/D4AC822E273540518525735A0058AD2B/$File/beer-helping-ugly-people-have-sex-710667.jpg

[Roxi]

Prohibition was the result of a few things:

1. The female suffrage movement

2. Men off at war, so they couldn't vote

3. The rise of the social gospel ("christian" socialism).


Basically women who misinterpreted the Bible were largely responsible for alcohol prohibition.

Yes, but I wonder who was responsible for allowing the government to poison it? Kinda makes people who think our government wouldn't go so far as poisoning people look stupid.

[ClayTrainor]

Not surprising. I wouldn't be surprised if they poison drugs from time to time as well.

A little off topic: Boardwalk Empire is a great show that really illustrates the scale of corruption that existed during the prohibition era. Highly recommended.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6z71l6HQwQ

[pcosmar]

Alcohol poisoning was an inside job!

:)

You could even call it a conspiracy I suppose.
but that is just a theory.

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

Sounds like 9/11.

[Brian4Liberty]

It's about taxes, of course. The secret is that barrels of lab grade denatured alcohol are often not actually denatured, as that is an added expense. The guys in the lab used to test every barrel before drinking, err, using any of it in experiments... ;)


Denatured alcohol (or methylated spirits) is ethanol that has additives to make it more poisonous or unpalatable, and thus, undrinkable. In some cases it is also dyed.

Denatured alcohol is used as a solvent and as fuel for spirit burners and camping stoves. Because of the diversity of industrial uses for denatured alcohol, hundreds of additives and denaturing methods have been used. Traditionally, the main additive is 10% methanol, giving rise to the term 'methylated spirit'. Other typical additives include isopropyl alcohol, acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, methyl isobutyl ketone, and denatonium.
...
Denatured alcohol is not, in itself, a preferred product—that is, it is not something which would be normally demanded if given the alternative of normal ethanol. Denatured alcohol and its manufacture are a public policy compromise. The supply and demand for denatured alcohol arises from the fact that normal alcohol (which in everyday language refers specifically to ethanol, suitable for human consumption as a drink) is usually very expensive compared to similar chemicals, being highly taxed for revenue and public health policy purposes (see sin tax). Pure ethanol would have the same health hazards as any other high concentration alcohol. As a result, if pure ethanol were made cheaply available as a fuel or solvent, people would drink it.

[Brian4Liberty]

Yes, but I wonder who was responsible for allowing the government to poison it?

The IRS and ATF?

[MaxPower]

I had read about this before, though the figures given here for people killed by the policy are wildly higher than those I had seen cited previously- of course, it does seem to me that it would be hard to determine how many people had died specifically as a result of the government poisoning program and how many had suffered the regular kind of alcohol-related death, or even died from some unrelated cause. Regardless, certainly one of the very most revolting examples history has to offer of the federal government's treatment of its own citizenry.