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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)
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!
Very much like the US still poisons its opiates by adding acetaminophen to them to ensure that they cannot be taken in very high doses? Ah, the war on drugs!
One might observe the very real actions of the FDA, approving EXPENSIVE dangerous new drugs, that should never have been released, and disparging other treatments that still work better (older generics, supplements). Some estimates are that several hundred thousand per year die because of such federally approved/mandated poisoning, millions more are injured.
Had a parent injured by several modern malpractices and pharmacides, turned out the way to survive was doing some older things that made simple biochemical sense. Much, much better now and I have objective measures to demonstrate it.
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.
Denaturing alcohol is a common practice even today to prevent tax dodging, perhaps the best mass-scale denaturing occurring today is in Ethanol plants.
It's a good thing we no longer do things like that. You know, like add tylenol (APAP) to opiate painkillers so that if you abuse them you die of liver failure. Cause that wouldn't be cool at all.
If you are reading my words with disbelief, I suggest that you visit the Web link that I have provided. The TSE was real and was an atrocity committed by the American government against its own citizens.
President Bill Clinton ultimately apologized to the victims and their families.
I think the home brewing and other do-it-yourself alcohol production communities would beg to differ with you. You only run into any real risk when you start distilling anyway.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The BATF has a list of approved formulas which must be used to render ethanol undrinkable in order to avoid federal excise taxes. The list is available here:
http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/27cfr21_03.html
The denaturants used range from simply nasty-tasting, to nausea-inducing, to downright lethal.
Apparently, Uncle Sam would rather you be dead or blind than getting driunk without paying the booze taxes...
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Let's keep it going:
Eugenics Board of North Carolina
Emp. added via bold on the interesting parts:
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina (EBNC) was an agency of the U.S. state of North Carolina created in 1933 after the state legislature authorized the practice of eugenics by state officials four years earlier.
In 1971, an act of the legislature transferred the EBNC to the newly created Department of Human Resources (DHR), and the secretary of that department was given managerial and executive authority over the board. Under a 1973 law, the Eugenics Board was transformed into the Eugenics Commission. Members of the commission were appointed by the governor and included the director of the Division of Social and Rehabilitative Services of the DHR, the director of Health Services, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane, the chief medical officer of the DHR in the area of mental health services, and the state attorney general. In 1974 the legislature transferred to the judicial system the responsibility for any sterilization proceedings against persons suffering from mental illness or mental retardation.
The Eugenics Commission was formally abolished by the legislature in 1977.
The board sterilized about 7,600 people, many of them against their will, between 1929 and 1974, in an attempt to remove mental illness and "social misbehaviour" from the gene pool. Among the victims were 2000 young people, some as young as ten years old.
Gotta love the government.
The bottles were marked poison before the government started doing this, because the industrial alcohol IS poison, even before the government started meddling.
To avoid the excise tax on liquors, industrial alcohol has to have methanol added to it.
The mathonal makes it even more toxic than ordinary ethanol, and unsuitable for drinking. But is required for it to be tax exempt.
Anyways, the issue is during the prohbition, some people were already drinking that unsuitable stuff. They were desperate, they were (probably) addicted, they took what they could get. So a lot of people were drinking this (a bit) industrial alcohol containing some [probably small] quantity of poisonous methanol.
So then the government' comes up with this "solution" is to make the stuff more deadly.... swiftly and quietly...brilliant!
Just because they didn't keep it a secret doesn't mean everyone automatically knew about it.
Or even that they had a good alternative.
The situation today is not that different. For example, deaths in the US and Mexico arising from heroin generally fall into two classes: (1) deaths because importing and selling heroin often involves violent criminal gangs, and (2) deaths because illegal heroin is impure. Both categories of deaths are purely government-inflicted, in the sense that the US government could end them tomorrow if it chose to legalize heroin.
Category #1 is pretty obvious: no more drug-related shootings if the stuff is being grown, imported, refined, packaged, and sold legally.
Category #2 is less well known to most people. When opiates were legal, people would generally just smoke opium. It had some bad health effects (e.g., constipation), but nothing all that deadly. People weren't overdosing from it. If you smoked too much, you fell asleep. Opium was legal in the US until around the turn of the 20th century. During most of the 20th century in the US, people were using extremely impure heroin. The impurities had two effects. One was that if it was maybe 10% heroin and 90% other ingredients, you couldn't get high from smoking or snorting it, so you had to inject it. AIDS transmission through shared needles wouldn't exist if heroin wasn't so impure that it had to be injected. The other was that the impurities themselves (often really nasty, random stuff like Ajax cleanser) could have devastating health effects. When you see a heroin addict who's lost all his teeth, it's because of the impurities, not the drug itself.
More recently, people have started to use black tar heroin imported from Mexico. Here is a series of articles about black tar heroin from the LA Times. This stuff is much cheaper than traditional heroin, so you don't get as many property crimes because druggies are stealing to support their habits. However, the black crud tends to cause collapsed veins and other problems. Also, a lot of people are overdosing because the black tar is stronger than they're used to. If heroin were legal, people would be able to look at the packaging and get accurate information about its strength.
Let's legalize heroin in the US tomorrow. Mexico could pull back from being on the verge of becoming a failed state. People in the US would stop dying. Violent and nonviolent crime would be reduced. The prison population would be greatly reduced. The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, due almost entirely to the failed war on drugs. Keeping all those people in jail is extremely expensive. E.g., California spends more on prisons than on higher education.
Find free books.
So basically the bootleggers were defrauding the drinkers during prohibition by replacing the cheap (but legal for industrial uses) Methanol which can lead to blindness and ultimately death. The underground market was defrauding and poisoning people wholesale. So in effect, the Methanol was only safe to be used in industrial products as it was and would never have poisoned people if it had not been fraudulently added to alcoholic beverages in the first place. That isn't to say the government wasn't wrong, it most certainly was as is the entire concept of a drug war in of its self, it is that these underground markets were knowingly putting tainted Methanol into their products and killing drinkers as a result.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Actually, we don't "poison" antifreeze with ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used because it makes a good antifreeze.
Unadulterated ethanol would be perfectly usable for most industrial purposes. But the government mandates the addition of other toxic substances which serve no purpose other than making the ethanol unusable as an intoxicant. That is the key difference here.
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The fact remains that these bootleggers were adding a chemical that was already known to be poisonous and extremely dangerous to drink. It's like complaining that the government put strychnine in gasoline and since bootleggers were adding gasoline to their drinks the government was solely responsible for deaths. No. These bootleggers put poison in their products to begin with; they knew it was killing people and they did it anyway.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
They studied men who already HAD the disease, and allowed it to progress untreated to see what would happen.
Still completely unethical, and one of the more atrocious chapters in US medical history. But claiming that the patients were intentionally infected with syphilis by gov't docs is simply wrong, and gives ammunition to those who would deny that the whole thing ever happened.
OTOH, the government did intentionally inject people (including mentally retarded children) with radioactive isotopes to see what the effects of nuclear fallout would be.
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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.
government run health care seems to work well everywhere it's been tried. I get to vote for the idiot who appoints the moron who denies me medical care. I might only have a small chance to fix the problem, but the guy in office remembers me when he makes his choices. how about in a free system? Oh right, only the rich (shareholders) get a vote.
This is still going on today with other illegal substances. The US has, for example, been poisoning marijuana fields with paraquat for decades.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I'm not saying the government is behind the weed found with lead in it, but after reading this I wouldn't be surprised. http://stopthedrugwar.org/reader_blogs/2008/apr/18/marijuana_lead_laced_pot_newest_
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.
Totally. That's what's bugged me about the whole "death panel" fubar from the beginning - we've ALREADY got them and the only people who aren't beholden to death panels are the uninsured.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Denatured alcohol wasn't the only poisonous alcohol people drank. Some people drank wood alcohol (methanol), which is itself poisonous. I remember hearing of a concoction called "smoke" that was wood alcohol mixed with water. The people who drank it were called "smoke hounds". It could make them blind and kill them, but they drank it anyway. I once heard of a blind musician who had become blind by drinking smoke when he was in prison.
Some people are crazy enough to drink anything, poison or not.
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".
Okay, first off, I agree with everything you've said here. But why has it become so common these days to call people with different or even incorrect information "liars"? Isn't it enough to just call them wrong and point out why? Why attribute deliberate deception to them without any proof? All that does is foster hostility and blind them to the point you are trying to make.
As far as I can tell, christianity is directly opposed authoritarianism.
So can you explain the role of God in your non-authoritarian Christianity?
You are worried about a government promoting drugs? well, that would be bad. That would about double the number of addicts. Yes, only double. Most users of hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, etc.) never become addicts. Basically there is a huge chunk of the population that is immune to addiction to most drugs. Why? They don't need what the drug provides. I'll use one of the most addictive substances known as an example.
People who try to quit smoking have about a 5% chance of succeeding cold turkey. That goes up to 15% with nicotine patches/gum. With an antidepressant? 30%.
Most addicts are depressed, or have mental illness, or too much stress, etc. This is what makes them vulnerable to 'self-medicate' to fix their troubles. Since drugs do alter the reward/pleasure centers in ways similar to what the normal mind naturally does, it does temporarily 'fix' the problem. Only it isn't permanent, it usually makes the mind even more off-balance once the drug wears off, -> classic addiction symptoms. However if the mind is already getting what it needs, then the motivation to take more isn't strong enough to cause addiction. It does a 'wow that was quite a trip' and goes on with it's life as normal. Just the way most adults who drink alcohol do.
It should be obvious to anyone that drugs aren't a serious threat to mankind. Most of them have been around for 1000's of years, and they haven't been banned until very recently. Unfortunately logic and knowledge aren't most people's strong points. What we get instead is common 'sense' like yours. (ie. whatever sense people do have in common...)
tl;dr version: Drugs are NOT the 'most successful destroyer of freedom', and banning them only makes them more successful destroyers of freedom. both for the addicts, and everyone else.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I do wonder though, industrial alcohol kills whether or not poison is added to it (and home-brewed alcohol is even worse). You could actually formulate this very same policy as trying to get people not to drink the poison by making it taste bad.
The only statistics are the deaths caused by alcohol poisoning, not a single death case reports that the strychnine had anything to do with the death (any kid and his dog will clearly see the difference in a corpse between alcohol poisoning and strychnine poisoning. Someone dying from strychnine poisoning *will* have died in an extremely cramped position, all muscles totally stretched, while alcohol poisoning will slowly lead to multiple organ failure, in other words, they wouldn't have missed it). And every society that outlaws drinkable alcohol, whether or not they poison it, will have lots of dead people on it's hands.
Every large city in the middle east, excepting Israel, has between hundreds and thousands of dead on it's hands due to use of selfmade or industrial alcohol every year. Not 70-year old people dying from liver failure that "probably" was caused by long-term alcohol poisoning like sometimes happens in America (which is a very peaceful way to die, incidentally), but 20 year old, perfectly fit men and women dying painfully after arriving in the hospital. Ryadh, the capital of the saudi women-stoning "kingdom of madness", has over a 1000 dead from alcohol poisoning yearly (including the son of the police chief a few years back, guess he couldn't get the money for imported alcohol from daddy).
Drinkable alcohol is a purified form of ethyl-alcohol. Industrial alcohol is (mostly) Methanol. It has an LD50 of 0.4g/kg. Which means that drinking 70 cl whisky made with methyl-alcohol will kill 50% of the people who drink it.
A third of a bottle of orange juice with just enough methanol to make it taste more or less like a wine will also kill 50% of the poeple who drink it.
Perhaps it's just me, but these numbers could easily have caused 20000 deaths during the prohibition without any help from the government. It seems to me the government would have to have added quite a bit of poison to even match the natural poisonous nature of illegal alcohol, to raise it would very, very easily have resulted in contamination of the entire food chain, which obviously didn't happen. So perhaps it's time to give the benefit of the doubt here, and not blame the government for the deaths of people who were poisoning themselves.
Btw : who voted in these policies ? Well, prohibition :
64th Congress (1915-1917)
Majority Party: Democrat (56 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (40 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
Who voted in the poisoning policy ?
65th Congress (1917-1919)
Majority Party: Democrat (54 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (42 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
And who voted it out ?
66th Congress (1919-1921)
Majority Party: Republican (49 seats)
Minority Party: Democrat (47 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
(The grandfather of Al Gore had a lot to do with these policies, man, talk about a guy that just does not have a very good history)
"I always find it funny that people who risk jail time for a drug claim they haven't got a problem. "No sirree, I am not a drunk. Yes I am drinking industrial alcohol laced with rat poison for flavor sold to me by outragous prices and I could go to jail for it, but really, I got it all under control."
Apparently we haha when someone offs them self doing something stupid like swimming with sharks with a bloody cut, but when someone does something Darwin like drinking poisoned alcohol, bust out the sympathy cards. Stupid is stupid and it's not going to get any smarter by justifying it.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
>>>To give everyone a chance at salvation and allow us to find our own paths with the free will bestowed upon us?
And spend eternity burning in hell if you choose the wrong thing. That's like a government that tolerates Free Speech Protesters for a few years and then decides, "That's enough" and runs over them with tanks and/or make them disappear in a prison.
NOT free will.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The enabling legislation for prohibition, The Volstead Act, was passed by Congress on October 18 1919, and Wilson's veto overridden on 28 October 1919 . The vote in the Senate was 65-20 (38 Republicans and 27 Democrats voted for the measure. 9 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted against it.) and 176-55 in the house. The bill's sponsor, Andrew Volstead, was a Republican.
The 21st amendment was passed by Congress on February 20,1933. The Cullen Harrison Act, which legalized 3.2 % beer, passed congress in March 21, 1933. It passed the House by a vote of 316-97. Because of copyright restrictions, I can't easily find the roll calls, but congress was overwhelmingly Democratic.
Members of both parties advocated for and against prohibition-- it was not a "partisan" issue. If you seek a party to blame, however, be aware that the man ultimately responsible for supervising prohibition enforcement., Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, was a Republican.
...many who claim to be christian advocate authoritarianism,
Sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to me. Christianity is defined by its followers, and only by its tenets in how its followers take them up.
Its like saying the Judeo-Christian religions are peaceful because one of the Ten Commandments says "thou shall not murder". Or saying politicians are inherently honest because all of them claim to be truthful.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
"I always find it funny that people who risk jail time for a drug claim they haven't got a problem.
Laws against doing something don't make something wrong to do, laws can at most reflect a judgement by society that something is wrong to do. The US, like most countries, wouldn't exist if people only did things that are legal. Slavery wasn't the right thing to do before it was illegal. And drinking alcohol wasn't fine to do, then not fine to do, then fine to do depending on the decade you're in.
Maybe the problem isn't that people's alcohol problem compelled them to drink alcohol with rat poison in it, maybe the problem was that people were *secretly* putting rat poison in alcohol in a deliberate effort to kill enough people that the rest would be forced to toe the line.