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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.'"
From TFA:
"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
Breakfast served all day!
In TFA: Charles Norris.
Because back in the day, he was just a medical examiner. He got the nickname "Chuck" from his ability to punch someone so hard they essentially became very similar to ground chuck.
One time I got really drunk and fell down on the sidewalk breaking my nose. When I got home I told my Mom that I had gotten in a horrid fight. I told her a man beat me up and forced me to drink till I passed out... "You're a goddamned liar ," she said. I saw you and your dad drinking out back and you fell down right in front of me on the way up the drive ... How stupid do you think I am? "Stupid enough to think dad still loves you," I said. You could hear my dad laughing from way down the street. Damn ... those were the good ol days...
Do you see?!? That was the CIA. They were poisoning your family's booze to disrupt a potential threat to the US government. You were meant to be the one that set the people free, but now look at you.
Let me fix that for you.
All better. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Of course not. And that BS about adding caffeine to the aforementionned mix has nothing at all to do with increasing the rate of absorption, and is all about making you jittery while your liver is failing. Those bastards!
Yes, the Government's unscrupulous poisoning of the feeble minded is an outrage, and a threat to innocent drinkers of antifreeze throughout the nation. THEY maintain that their hands are clean by pointing out that the containers all bear clear labels of "poison" upon them, but that is merely a clever cover-up for their nefarious plans.
But the truly dangerous conspiracy, the greatest threat that few date to speak about, are the horrors lurking behind the innocuously named hydrogn dioxide. I urge you to look into the threat that substance presents, despite the Government's outrageous self-serving assurance about how harmless it is.
Yes, but most of the time the denaturing is done by adding something that will make you feel sick and make the liquid in question taste horrible, and this is clearly pointed out on the containers. In fact, I've seen people drink more than a liter of modern denatured alcohol with the only side effect that they felt a little sick (gotta love some of the characters that show up at music festivals).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Care to share the structural formula for that one, before you head out to claim your Nobel in chemistry?
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Dude, I stand corrected.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
But... but... but... otherwise they would be throwing their lives away! We will not let them die of substance abuse, even if it kills them!
Too soon?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
That explains the headaches and munchies.
> no intelligent comment has ever started with "Dude."
That's rather harsh coming from someone who doesn't capitalize their sentences!
That's nothing! They're against blowjobs, too, if you can believe that. You can look it up.
What kind of sick view of the world warps a person to the point where they believe that having someone brush their teeth with the old meat whistle is actually a bad thing?
Seriously.
I think I was a freshman in high school when one of the Jesuits at the catholic high school I attended said that oral sex was sinful because it was a sexual act that did not give glory to the Lord as a reproductive act. That was when I realized there could not be a god that would give us peckers and mouths and then say "Oh, by the way...use them and you will burn for eternity!?. It just defied any sort of logic IMO.
That was about the end of organized religion for me. Although I did once go to a Catholic Youth Organization function once more because I thought I might be able to get Patti O'Connor to give me a wobble job if I was really nice to her and appeared to be a devout person. It didn't work, so I never again darkened the door of a religious institution.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's the exact opposite of what the priest told me back when I was in the boy choir.
Probably a side-effect of ingesting E 666, the Addidtive of the Beast.
You're equating blowjobs with having sex with children? I hope your religion doesn't have anything against putting stuff up your ass, because thats one mighty big stick you have up there.
Exactly, and the home of the grave, in this case.
> I hope I love in about 50 years
I'm sure if you keep looking you'll find someone. Sexual intercourse amongst the elderly isn't all that uncommon, however distasteful the mental images it conjurs up.