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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.
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".
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 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"
"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.