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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.
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'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.