The Government Poisoned the Whiskey
To frighten people out of drinking, Washington ordered the alcohol made deadlier — and kept ordering it as the bodies piled up.
During Prohibition, bootleggers got much of their supply by stealing industrial alcohol and redistilling it back into something drinkable. The federal government's answer was not only to chase the bootleggers. It was to make the industrial alcohol poisonous — and then, when people kept drinking, to make it more poisonous still.
The Recipe
Industrial alcohol was "denatured" by law: manufacturers were required to add noxious chemicals so it could not be consumed. By the mid-1920s, federal officials ordered the formulas strengthened. The additives came to include kerosene, gasoline, benzene, mercury salts, formaldehyde, chloroform, and — most lethally — methyl alcohol, which the Treasury pushed to as much as ten percent of the product.
The state knew the bottles were killing people. It tightened the recipe anyway.
The Toll
New York City's chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, condemned the program publicly, calling it what it was. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning effort had — by some estimates — contributed to the deaths of around 10,000 people. The figure is an estimate and is debated; what is not debated is that the government knowingly added lethal poison to alcohol it knew people would drink.
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The justification was public health. The method was poison, applied to the public.
You've Seen the File.
The government knew the alcohol was killing people and made it deadlier on purpose. Public safety policy — or punishment by poison?
The Poisoner's Handbook — Deborah Blum
The story of the poisoning program and the forensic scientists who exposed it, in Jazz Age New York.
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