The US government once poisoned alcohol to get people to stop drinking

The US government once poisoned alcohol to get people to stop drinking

During Prohibition the U.S. government required poison added to industrial alcohol to prevent people from drinking it. People drank it anyway. Over 10,000 died.⁣ ⁣ Google: Tainted Alcohol Prohibition⁣ In 1926, the federal government increased the amount of methanol, a poisonous alcohol-based substance, required in industrial alcohols, which people at the time used to make bootleg liquor. Faced with the ongoing failure of Prohibition, the increase was intended to discourage people from drinking. "It gives a greater warning to the drinker that he is getting hold of something that he should leave alone," a government chemist told the New York Times at the time. But people didn't stop drinking. Thirsty for any booze they could get, many Americans risked drinking the super-poisoned alcohol — and thousands died as a result. Even before Prohibition, the government required industrial alcohol manufacturers to add contaminates to their product to separate it from drinking alcohol. So the government already had an apparatus in place to require these manufacturers to add different things into the alcohol to taint it so it's non-drinkable.

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Come the middle of the 1920s, people are still drinking alcohol, and alcoholism rates are rising. As part of that, there's increasing evidence of methanol poisoning across the country. So the government comes back and says, "Well, okay. We have this sort of scatter-shot of alcohol poisoning across the country. But the bootleggers are taking industrial alcohol and cleaning it up, and that's not putting people off from drinking. So what if we made that industrial alcohol really poisonous? We would make it so poisonous that it would be so scary that people wouldn't drink it." The government then passed regulations in 1926 that required the industrial manufacturers to add a lot of poisonous things into their alcohol knowing that this stuff was going to get stolen by bootleggers and people were going to drink it. The moral crusade idea was that people won't drink anything that might kill them, which was obviously ridiculous since people were already drinking unsafe alcohol at the time They put all kinds of poisonous stuff into the alcohol. There was benzine, there was mercury, there was this list of formulas that's heart-stopping horrible. But in particular they put more wood alcohol, or methanol, because their own tests showed bootleggers couldn't get it out — it's too closely bonded to the drinking alcohol. It was like a chemists' war at this point. Bootlegger chemists trying to take things out, and government chemists trying to find a way to keep them in. But the bootlegger chemists had not been able to find a good way to get methanol out. People knew this was going to kill people. They were warning the government in advance. Charles Norris, who was the chief medical officer in New York City, and Alexander Gettler, who was the chief toxicologist in the city, told the government not to do this. The government did it, anyway. People started dying right away. There was this wash of super-poisoned alcohol turning up everywhere, because it was the only stuff someone could get. This was the alcohol of the country. ⁣10,000. Experts could say at the time that those deaths were over and above the other alcohol-related deaths. These numbers notched up after the more poisoned alcohol went into the market. But it's not a clean calculation.

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