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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.'"
Nice how much hate exists among our democracy. (Ok, Representative democracy)
Denaturing alcohol is a common practice even today to prevent tax dodging, perhaps the best mass-scale denaturing occurring today is in Ethanol plants.
Stupid doctors are as much to blame for this as the FDA. When a drug company's patent is about to expire, they often superficially change the molecular structure of the popular drug so that they can get a new patent. Then they start the marketing blitz to "ask your doctor about" the new drug. Smart doctors will prescribe the proven cure over the patent cash-in drugs.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
It's not a matter of not being able to believe the government would ever do such a thing. It's laughed at because the same people who would call a government review board a "death panel" fully support the private "death panels" each insurance company has.
You really think that the drug gangs in Mexico would just stop fighting if drugs were legalized?
Yes. When you take the profit out of it, they stop. The only reasons gangs exist in the USA is because of prohibition. The mob tried to get in, and was stuck doing things like garbage collection. But Prohibition funded them directly, and they gained a foothold. That let them fund less profitable ventures, like protection rackets, prostitution, and tax evasion. Make all the illegal stuff legal, and the funding of gangs ends. No more money, no more guns. No guns, no violence.
But the Puritanical US won't let that happen here, and pushes hard to make others conform to our morality. Nothing is worse than religion... "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians." God is fine, the people that claim to be following Him are the problem...
When you take away what people have been fighting over, and that fighting gave them power, they will just find something else to fight over.
You seem very confused. These aren't idealistic people fighting for or against anything. They are capitalists where the rules of capitalism require enforcing their own contracts through violence and they are allowed to create barriers of entry for competitors (those barriers of entry being served via lead). They don't fight because it is a fun way to pass the time. They fight because it makes them lots of money. Make it legal, tax it, and you'll have the government funding increase while their funding decreases. They'll move on to profiting from the next victimless crime, and if you get rid of them all, they'll get a job.
Learn to love Alaska
Ya I've never liked the argument that because marijuana is natural it must be safe/harmless. No, not really. Plenty of dangerous natural shit out there. Some of the most deadly venoms known are from natural sources. That something is natural has no bearing at all on if it is safe or healthy or anything else.
Now, that said, marijuana is rather safe and non-addictive, and as such ought to be legalized. However the reason to legalize it is because it is safe and we have science showing that, not because it is natural.
An insurance company can't prevent you from being treated for a condition.
Total, unfiltered denial of reality.
If a medical procedure costs $400,000 and I have $400 in my bank account, and my insurance company says "We're not going to cover it." they are essentially PREVENTING me from being treated. If the treatment would save my life, they are effectively a "private death panel".