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The Gory Federal Poisoning Program the US Does Not Want You to Know

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Prohibition in the United States: National Ban of Alcohol
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As illicit alcohol shops and underground alcohol sales exploded, the number of people drinking alcoholic beverages grew higher than it was before Prohibition. According to Slate:



The Extermination

It soon became apparent that Prohibition was an unprecedented catastrophe.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, an estimated 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol annually was stolen, “re-natured”, and sold as palatable alcohol to the country’s drinkers in the mid-1920s.

As a result, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge’s government decided to make the denaturing formulas lethal by adding poisonous methyl alcohol (wood alcohol) into the mix.

The new denaturing formulas included poisons like kerosene, brucine, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone — which were difficult for the crime syndicates’ chemists to remove from the industrial alcohol, and make it palatable again.

But again, people didn’t stop drinking. Many Americans risked drinking the federally poisoned alcohol — and thousands died as a result. Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, told Vox:

“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.

“The estimates I saw were about 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.”

History of Prohibition: Why It Failed
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In 1926 alone, 1,200 people were hospitalized by poisonous alcohol in New York City; 400 died. People began dropping like flies. By 1928, the public felt the U.S. government must intervene. But the federals announced that the government could do absolutely nothing as “the use and sale of poisonous alcohol was not regulated by any of the federal laws.” Yet, Charles Norris refused to pull his punches:


By the time the Prohibition ended — after the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933 — the horrendously ill-fated federal poisoning program had killed nearly 10,000 Americans.
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Kyle James Lee

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