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US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition
Hugh Pickens writes "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.'"
has nothing to do with recreational self-destruction
you are not self-medicating when you are an addict
i don't know how you can equate the two concepts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The acetaminophen is not to poison a hard abuser;
Then they are just poisoning the casual abusers. Does that make it better?
Learn to love Alaska
Be aware: these were progressives...not Conservatives nor Republicans that brought us prohibition. The same people today have been picking our toilets, our light bulbs, trans-fats (NYC) and other choices, across the boards.
A Conservative would never chose these things for you.
Copyright?
You've been hanging around on slashdot too long.
People get sued, not shot over downloading mp3's.
the names of the illegal things now?
Heroin, cocaine, meth, marijuana, ecstasy etc etc etc...
We must poison the addicts to death so they can't poison themselves to death.