Feds poisoned 10,000 in fucked up prohibition ploy
Slashdot points us to Slate’s horrible story about how Federal authorities poisoned 10,000 people in the name of prohibition. In the 1920s and 1930s the government poisoned industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking.
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.
A new book on the subject discusses how the ‘extermination experiment’ helped create modern forensics and the first published scale relating blood-alcohol content to levels of drunkenness.
