How We Sold Our Soul–Dark Side of Prohibition: Government Poisoned Alcohol Killed Thousands

The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history, not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases, our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers that be. They say hindsight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these landmark decisions in this manner. The people who made these decisions, in many cases, thought they were doing the right thing. However, in some instances, they were made for expediency, and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses, I am sure that number will increase.

When the Mayor of Berlin, Gustav Boess, visited New York City in the fall of 1929, one of the questions he had for his host, Mayor James J. Walker, was when Prohibition was to go into effect. The problem was that Prohibition has already been the law of the United States for nearly a decade. That Boess had to ask tells you plenty about how well it was working.

The Noble Experiment

When the Prohibition era in the United States began on January 19, 1920, a few sage observers predicted it would not go well. Certainly, previous attempts to outlaw the use of alcohol in American history had fared poorly. When a Massachusetts town banned the sale of alcohol in 1844, an enterprising tavern owner took to charging patrons for the price of seeing a striped pig—the drinks came free with the price of admission. When Maine passed a strict prohibition law in 1851, the result was not temperance, but resentment among the city’s working class and Irish immigrant population. A deadly riot in Portland in 1855 lead to the law’s repeal. Now, Prohibition was being implemented on a national scale, and being enshrined in the Constitution no less. What followed was a litany of unintended consequences.

The Volstead Act

The Volstead Act was much stricter than most Americans had anticipated, including Wine and Beer in Prohibition.

This should have come as no surprise with a venture as experimental as Prohibition. It is no mistake that President Herbert Hoover’s 1928 description of Prohibition as “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose” entered the popular lexicon as “the noble experiment.” It was unfortunate for the entire nation that the experiment failed as miserably as it did.

Economics of Prohibition

Unintended Consequences | Prohibition | Ken Burns | PBS - Post Image

Prohibition’s supporters were initially surprised by what did not come to pass during the dry era. When the law went into effect, they expected sales of clothing and household goods to skyrocket. Real estate developers and landlords expected rents to rise as saloons closed and neighborhoods improved. Chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drink companies all expected growth. Theater producers expected new crowds as Americans looked for new ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. None of it came to pass.

Instead, the unintended consequences proved to be a decline in amusement and entertainment industries across the board. Restaurants failed, as they could no longer make a profit without legal liquor sales. Theater revenues declined rather than increase, and few of the other economic benefits that had been predicted came to pass.

On the whole, the initial economic effects of Prohibition were largely negative. The closing of breweries, distilleries and saloons led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, and in turn thousands more jobs were eliminated for barrel makers, truckers, waiters, and other related trades.

The unintended economic consequences of Prohibition didn’t stop there. One of the most profound effects of Prohibition was on government tax revenues. Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on excise taxes in liquor sales to fund their budgets. In New York, almost 75% of the state’s revenue was derived from liquor taxes. With Prohibition in effect, that revenue was immediately lost. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce. The most lasting consequence was that many states and the federal government would come to rely on income tax revenue to fund their budgets going forward.

Uneven Enforcement

Prohibition led to many more unintended consequences because of the cat and mouse nature of Prohibition enforcement. While the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating beverages, it did not outlaw the possession or consumption of alcohol in the United States. The Volstead Act, the federal law that provided for the enforcement of Prohibition, also left enough loopholes and quirks that it opened the door to myriad schemes to evade the dry mandate.

One of the legal exceptions to the Prohibition law was that pharmacists were allowed to dispense whiskey by prescription for any number of ailments, ranging from anxiety to influenza. Bootleggers quickly discovered that running a pharmacy was a perfect front for their trade. As a result, the number of registered pharmacists in New York State tripled during the Prohibition era.

Because Americans were also allowed to obtain wine for religious purposes, enrollments rose at churches and synagogues, and cities saw a large increase in the number of self-professed rabbis who could obtain wine for their congregations.

The law was unclear when it came to Americans making wine at home. With a wink and a nod, the American grape industry began selling kits of juice concentrate with warnings not to leave them sitting too long or else they could ferment and turn into wine. Home stills were technically illegal, but Americans found they could purchase them at many hardware stores, while instructions for distilling could be found in public libraries in pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The law that was meant to stop Americans from drinking was instead turning many of them into experts on how to make it.

The trade in unregulated alcohol had serious consequences for public health. As the trade in illegal alcohol became more lucrative, the quality of alcohol on the black market declined. On average, 1000 Americans died every year during the Prohibition from the effects of drinking tainted liquor.

The Greatest Consequence

The effects of Prohibition on law enforcement were also negative. The sums of money being exchanged during the dry era proved a corrupting influence in both the federal Bureau of Prohibition and at the state and local level. Police officers and Prohibition agents alike were frequently tempted by bribes or the lucrative opportunity to go into bootlegging themselves. Many stayed honest, but enough succumbed to the temptation that the stereotype of the corrupt Prohibition agent or local cop undermined public trust in law enforcement for the duration of the era.

The growth of the illegal liquor trade under Prohibition made criminals of millions of Americans. As the decade progressed, court rooms and jails overflowed, and the legal system failed to keep up. Many defendants in prohibition cases waited over a year to be brought to trial. As the backlog of cases increased, the judicial system turned to the “plea bargain” to clear hundreds of cases at a time, making a it common practice in American jurisprudence for the first time.

A Nation of Scofflaws

In 1920, Prohibition goes into effect and millions of law-abiding Americans become lawbreakers overnight. Drys had hoped Prohibition would make the country a safer place, but the law has many victims

The greatest unintended consequence of Prohibition however, was the plainest to see. For over a decade, the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess. The solution the United States had devised to address the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. The statistics of the period are notoriously unreliable, but it is very clear that in many parts of the United States more people were drinking, and people were drinking more.

There is little doubt that Prohibition failed to achieve what it set out to do, and that its unintended consequences were far more far reaching than its few benefits. The ultimate lesson is two-fold. Watch out for solutions that end up worse than the problems they set out to solve, and remember that the Constitution is no place for experiments, noble or otherwise.

The Consequences of Prohibition did not just include effects on people’s drinking habits but also on the worldwide economy, the people’s trust of the government, and the public health system. Alcohol, from the rise of the temperance movement to modern day restrictions around the world, has long been a source of turmoil. When alcoholic beverages were first banned under the Volstead Act in 1919, the United States government had little idea of the severity of the consequences. It was first thought that a ban on alcohol would increase the moral character of society, but a ban on alcohol had vast unintended consequences.

The first to be impacted were the alcohol manufactures, distilleries and various breweries,. When they were shut down, it caused a massive drop in the economy and led to the unemployment of thousands of workers. Additionally, venues such as theaters and clubs which previously used alcohol to draw people in lost much of their business.

Various methods to obtain alcohol, whether illegally or through legal loopholes in the system, were established. Bootlegging and organized crime became a prominent issue in the United States. Various secret venues popped up around the country, often formed by organized crime syndicates. Because of the rise in illegal manufacturing and limited resources, few restrictions were placed on the production of alcohol. Questionable ingredients were frequently added which were harmful to human consumption. Poisoning became a serious issue as various un-safe methods were used to make the production of alcohol an easier and cheaper process. Though these methods led to an increase in sales, and larger profits for those selling them, they had severe health consequences on those who bought illegal alcohol. Another way in which alcohol could be obtained was through a medical prescription. Though there were limits to how much a doctor could prescribe, this access to alcoholic drinks intended for medical purposes was heavily abused. Relatively few medical licenses were revoked.

With the rapid increase in organized crime and illegal production of alcohol, there was a great strain on law enforcement. Lack of funding due to losing out on much tax revenue from alcohol manufacturers did not help the mounting problem. Desperate for solutions, the government took to more extreme measures. Whether directly or indirectly, the government began to increase the toxicity of industrial alcohol used to make illegal alcoholic beverages to discourage consumption. One prominent method, which ultimately lead to the death of thousands, was the use of methyl alcohol. This type of alcohol can be deadly even in small doses. Whether obtaining liquor illegally or sourcing it from industrial alcohol poisoned by the government, drinking alcohol was dangerous during the prohibition era. A famous example of poisoning is the case of Bix Beiderbecke whose medical records and subsequent death seem to point to methanol poisoning, possibly because of the United States government.

Various governments around the world adopted prohibition measures, as can be seen in several European countries, Canada, and New Zealand, around the time of the Volstead act. More modern examples include Iran, whose restriction on alcohol helped contribute to poisonings across the country during the outbreak of COVID-19, and the Czech Republic, who placed temporary restrictions on alcoholic drinks to protect consumers from poisonous substances already present in the liquor.

History

The 18th amendment went into effect on January 16, 1920, prohibiting all commercial use of alcohol. Alcohol had long been a source of contention in the United States, the temperance movement having started in the early 1800s. The temperance movement was founded upon the principles that alcohol was inherently evil and led its consumers to become violent, lazy, and poor contributors to society. Regarding these issues, The Millbank Quarterly said that supporters of the temperance movement “regarded alcohol the way people today view heroin: as an inherently addicting substance”. Alcohol was often deemed by anti-alcoholics as the main cause of a failing society. The movement was led largely by the middle-class and was strongly backed by women. In fact, the temperance movement was often associated and interconnected with the women’s rights movement.

When the Volstead Act was passed, major alcohol producers were forced to close down their businesses and thousands of workers were left without jobs. “The Bureau of Internal revenue estimated that the prohibition cause the shutdown of over 200 distilleries, a thousand breweries, and over 170,000 liquor stores.” Additionally, performance venues, theaters and clubs that sold alcohol took hits as they lost customers who could no longer drink in these places. This caused a massive blow to the economy as the tax revenue for alcohol in the year 1914 (a few years before the Volstead Act) was an estimated $226,000,000.

Additional problems arose in the form of illegal production and distribution of alcohol and an increase in organized crime. Bootleggers were able to sell alcohol completely untaxed as their alcohol production was kept hidden from the United States government. Because of the outrage of people toward the banning of liquor, many were more than willing to buy illegally. Various secret venues and clubs formed around the country. Crime syndicates used this opportunity to spread their influence. As they continued to produce and sell alcohol, the government poured millions of dollars into the Bureau of Prohibition to increase enforcement. The agency was much too small to handle the rapid growth in crime.

Enforcement

A prominent effect of Prohibition was the nearly total destruction of the liquor market. The public believed that Prohibition would be permanent, especially since there had never been a constitutional amendment that hadn’t persisted. Preceding events suggested that the federal government would put a limit on how much alcohol content drinks could have, or how much a person could consume, but eventually, Congress unreservedly outlawed liquor. The Volstead act and the 18th amendment together made it nearly impossible to distribute liquor or even possess drinks with more than “0.5% alcohol by volume.”

Though the government did introduce conditions that would help the transition to occur more smoothly, it was not enough. It was thought that “eliminating the legal manufacture and sale of alcoholic drink would solve the major social and economic problems of American society.” Prohibition was opposed by a diverse group before it went into effect. Bootlegging, the process of making illegal alcoholic beverages, quickly sprang up throughout the United States. Many participated in these practices. On the contrary, many individuals also decided to abide by the new radical laws. Some positive changes did come from Prohibition in the United States, but acceptance was not widespread enough to merit the challenges the country faced.

Due to the economic crashes caused by Prohibition, entire industries were shattered by the loss of trade routes and investors, creating a demand for alcoholic drinks that severely outranked the supply. The effect was that more and more strong liquors were produced and distributed by bootleggers. Consequently, the government had to find a way to increase enforcement and regulation but was faced with limited funding already, especially with the loss of tax revenue coming from the sale of liquor. These challenges led the government to try some more treacherous methods.

Prohibition enforcement mainly consisted of cutting off supply through smuggling and illegal manufacturing of alcoholic products. The government was highly effective at preventing alcohol from entering the country illegally, but bootleggers found a way around this. By stealing or making deals to acquire industrial alcohol, (from factories that made ink, cleaning chemicals, fuels, adhesives, and various other products) bootleggers were able to cut out the long process of fermentation to make alcohol. Instead, they combined the industrial alcohol with their customary flavorings to make alcoholic beverages in a more efficient process. Subsequently, they made more money and were able to meet the high demand for the products.

The Volstead Act, legislation to enforce the 18th Amendment, carried out countermeasures to this practice. The United States federal government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. There are various perspectives about what steps the government took and how far they went with this plan. USA Today stated that the government went to “unethical lengths to prevent alcohol consumption.” However, this source does not agree that the government directly poisoned drinking alcohol. Instead, it claims that the government indirectly poisoned citizens by denaturing industrial alcohol meant for manufacturing. Others believe that Congress hired chemists to combat the bootleggers who were using stolen industrial alcohol to make moonshine and other drinks. Factories were obligated by law to denature their alcohol with chemicals that made it difficult to drink safely. In turn, bootleggers paid off the federal chemists and hired their own to neutralize the toxins in the alcohol. Eventually, the lack of obedience to the laws of Prohibition frustrated the government. The government invested more in their scientific processes, creating new blends to increase the toxicity of the chemicals in the industrial alcohol. The federal government’s chemists finally found a denaturing formula that the bootleggers couldn’t beat. They added a large amount of methyl alcohol. “As one government chemist told reporters, no one had figured out how to completely detoxify wood alcohol. Soon after, the Treasury Department, under the direction of President Calvin Coolidge and Congress, mandated that industrial alcohol contain their newly discovered blend. Illicit beverages became very lethal, even with the efforts of bootlegger chemists to remove threats. A very small amount of undiluted methyl alcohol could kill a human being, and the effects were quickly realized. In 1926 New York City, 585 people died from this government action. Over 5000 fatalities from this poisoning, at least a 600% increase from the previous deaths from alcohol, were said to have resulted in the entire country.

Before the government started this process, bootleggers were already making alcoholic beverages unsafe for the public. These illicit liquor manufacturers found that by adding some questionable ingredients, they could simulate certain types of beverages they had enjoyed before prohibition, or create entirely new flavors. Some bootleggers added dead rats to their moonshine to make their alcohol taste like bourbon. Others used tar and oil from trees to replace gin and scotch. Contraband beer or wine was fairly easy to come by, unlike these new drinks. Concocting these flavors increased demand for their products. However, these practices made it very unhealthy to drink illegal alcohol. As such, doctors were quite familiar with frequent visits from those who became sick from drinking.

Conspiracy theories

Many conspiracies came from the Prohibition era in the United States, though many of the details came from those who were under the influence of alcohol. In 1927, most of the industrial alcohol in the United States had been poisoned under the order of the government. The government had created a blend that contended with the bootleggers’ chemists. This blend included a large amount of methyl (wood) alcohol or methanol. In 1928, an influential jazz soloist by the name of Bix Beiderbecke drank a poisoned cocktail in New York. He fell ill and, with a weakened immune system, succumbed to pneumonia about 2 years later. Extensive medical records of his case are accessible. As Deborah Blum describes, drinking alcohol poisoned with methyl alcohol would cause dizziness and nausea, not unlike a more extreme version of the effects of normal grain-based alcohols. However, “people poisoned [with methyl alcohol] would often seem to recover from that first bout of dizzy sickness, [feeling] better while the alcohol was being metabolized.” The poisoned alcohol had the effects of other alcohol, but methyl alcohol is not easy for the human body to break down, so it became more poisonous. Eventually, the seemingly harmless alcohol becomes lethal and acidic substances in the stomach. These by-products of metabolism quickly destroyed the affected’s optic nerve and lungs. Bix Beiderbecke was a tough case because of his long history as an alcoholic and cigarette addict, but his symptoms nearly perfectly matched the side effects of methyl alcohol poisoning. The conclusion is that Bix Beiderbecke was one of many victims of the poisoning of alcohol during Prohibition.

Another conspiracy theory of Prohibition is in the more contemporary context of medical drug use controversies. The 18th Amendment and its accompanying enforcement act were quite specific about all aspects of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. These laws anticipated many of the major issues that would come because of Prohibition, but they underestimated the breadth and scope of the issues. One clause included a statement that read “no one but a physician holding a permit to prescribe liquor shall issue any prescription for liquor.” As stated by The Washington Post, licensed physicians could prescribe alcohol in restricted quantities for medical purposes. During this time, the Bureau of Prohibition “issued…[these] permits to 64,000 physicians, but only revoked [around] 170 licenses…per year”. However, with the enforcement problems that the government faced, they were unable to keep up with the thousands of prescriptions doctors wrote every day. Doctors were constantly pressured to prescribe liquor, and the limited enforcement meant they didn’t have to worry about consequences.

Congress eventually realized it had to do something about the issue and passed the Emergency Beer bill in 1921, even under pressure from the American Medical Association not to. This act of legislation limited the types of liquor and the alcohol content that a physician could prescribe. Permits themselves weren’t enough anymore. A limit was placed on the number of patients that doctors could prescribe alcohol to. Eventually, the pharmaceutical associations began to fight these regulations, but it was not long after that the 18th amendment was repealed, ending Prohibition. Still, the effects of this issue live on. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the end of Prohibition brought about the decriminalization of many drugs for medical use. Law enforcement and politics have come to be an integral part of the medical world.

Effects and modern examples

The effects of Prohibition and the decisions of the United States government to enforce these laws were widespread. Prohibition in the United States wasn’t an isolated incident, it was a worldwide movement that included Russia, Canada, and New Zealand among others. Wartime procedures and religious efforts ended one of the most alcohol-filled eras ever. Beer production was at an all-time high, along with other alcoholic beverages. Trade routes and markets were reliant on this big business. Prohibition wiped out an enormous, thriving industry. Thousands lost jobs as businesses like liquor stores, breweries, distilleries, and even theaters or clubs who all relied upon the market of alcohol were forced to shut down. Some believe that the 18th amendment had more of an economic effect than it ever did on the citizens who were supposed to comply. The American Journal of Public Health published an article that shows why the bootlegging industry of denatured industrial alcohol was created to combat Prohibition. In many ways, bootlegging kept the market for alcoholic drinks alive, but now the money was going to a completely different set of people. Bootlegged alcohol also attracted more people to the drinking lifestyle because it was more exciting to do it undercover.

One of the key statistics that shows how much alcohol the U.S. government poisoned to enforce Prohibition with this opposition is the number of people who were hospitalized or died from drinking the toxic alcohol. There is little reliable information about this issue. Some believe that the government poisoned over 10,000 Americans, whereas others believe it was mainly limited to New York City. Either way, poisoning was not an effective enforcement strategy. People were addicted, uninformed, and enjoyed living above the law. The temperance movement, which instigated Prohibition, led many to believe that alcohol was immoral and destructive to society. Those who were part of the movement hoped that a ban would help people to change their attitudes toward the substance. Evidently, the “noble experiment” of Prohibition in the United States did not have that effect. The current war on drugs in the United States has been heavily influenced by the events that occurred and the public and business opinions that were expressed during Prohibition.

Though the temperance and prohibition movement are largely associated with the United States, several other countries adopted similar methods of controlling alcohol during that time. Some of the other countries that limited alcohol during the prohibition era were “Iceland, Finland, both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, Canadian provinces, and Canada’s federal government.”

COVID-19 had drastic effects on the world and in a particular case it also helped spur a methanol poisoning outbreak in Iran. At the start of COVID-19, little was done to prepare for and prevent rapid spread throughout the country. Additionally, false information was provided on how to treat the virus, one of the methods being gargling and consuming alcohol. Because production of alcohol is illegal in Iran, bootlegging and illegal production of the substance began to increase. Home-brewed alcohol often contained methanol and other toxic chemicals that were extremely harmful to the body. By May 2020, several thousand were admitted to the hospital due to alcohol poisoning, and an estimated 500 individuals died while under care. Improper medical practices, lack of equipment, and limited capacity due to COVID-19 patients all contributed to the issue.

Another modern example of the issue of prohibition and methanol poisoning happened in the Czech Republic in 2012. This prohibition act was to reduce alcohol poisoning. Methanol (methyl or wood alcohol) poisonings were common as illegal alcohol flooded the market. The Czech Republic government wanted to stop the poisonings, so they prohibited the sale of alcoholic drinks that had more than a 20% alcohol content. However, the prohibitionary effort had little effect. Instead, the ban was lifted after only a few weeks when the Czech Ministry of Health saw that it was not slowing methanol poisonings. The U.S. National Library of Medicine published an article that performed a small study of Czech citizens. Consisting of some interviews and polls, the study determined that over one third of alcohol users drank liquors with that much alcohol content during the short prohibition. Several participants drank more alcohol with less alcohol content, but the prohibition did not result in healthier drinking habits.

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

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.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, previously wrote about the topic for Slate. I spoke with Blum by phone recently about this wrong-headed government scheme and its implications.

Congress and the White House doubled the amount of methanol in industrial liquor and added benzine to the mix. The poisonous substances were meant to discourage people from drinking bootleg products. (New York Times)

German Lopez: Tell me about the time the federal government purposely poisoned alcohol.

Deborah Blum: 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.

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.

GL: What did they put in the industrial alcohol?

DB: 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.

GL: How many people died as a result of this?

DB: 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. But it’s not a clean calculation.

When I first saw a newspaper article about this, I thought it couldn’t be right. The government wouldn’t have done that, and I would have heard about it if it happened. I ended up hunting it down through all kinds of newspapers and magazines of the time.

That was when I realized that this was widely known when they instituted this program. Charles Norris wrote this fantastic indictment called “Our Essay in Extermination” about the government poisoning American citizens through Prohibition. So there was a real scandal nature to it when it happened.

GL: What was the reaction like at the time?

DB: It’s really an interesting political period. Political coverage at the time put people into two shorthands: the dries and the wets. The dries were all the people in political power who believed that we should be a dry nation, and the wets were the opposite.

At this moment in the mid-1920s, the dries are definitely in power. They’re running the Treasury Department, which is the department that primarily enforces the liquor laws. The president at the time, Calvin Coolidge, is a dry politician; Herbert Hoover, who also came in later, was a dry politician.

After a bout of alcohol-related deaths, opponents of Prohibition in Congress demanded the government reel back its poisonous requirements for industrial alcohol. (New York Times)

They announce the plan as a big warning message from the government: “Quit drinking, because we’re going to make this a lot more poisonous.” They even had moments when they would call in reporters to make sure everyone knew.

Public health officials, like Norris, pointed out that people were already dying from all kinds of poisoned alcohol because they couldn’t get access to legal, safe alcohol. They knew more people would die from the government’s plan.

GL: So what was the effect of this policy? It seems to me like it would just hurt poor people, because wealthier people could afford the best liquor at the time.

DB: Right. There was still very expensive liquor that someone could get if they were willing to pay a lot for it. It was smuggled in, primarily from Canada or the Caribbean. There were also companies that would take people on cruises down to the Caribbean. If someone had enough money, people could pay to get the good stuff smuggled in from Europe. And if someone had the money, they could make a good backyard distillery.

But if someone went to a speakeasy, he wouldn’t know where the speakeasy got its liquor. That led to deaths, but they didn’t really happen among the wealthy.

Now, the government’s regulations weren’t the only source of poisoned liquor. Some of the bootleggers also set off all sorts of different poisoning episodes.

There’s a famous example called Ginger Jake. As bootleggers tried to find more liquor substitutes, they made different formulas. In the South in particular there was this Jamaican ginger, which was basically ginger-flavored alcohol. When that got stopped by Prohibition, there were a lot of people who wanted to find a replacement. They came up with a formula that gave a buzz with no alcohol, but it had some chemical compounds that are neurotoxic. These compounds actually attack the same parts of the neural system that are damaged by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. People started popping up with semi-paralytic symptoms, and at first people thought it was polio.

Again, this affected poor people. This was a poor man’s drink.

GL: Another thing that’s interesting about this story is that the government did something similar with marijuana in the 1970s.

DB: Right. The Paraquat spraying. The government was trying to get rid of marijuana plants in Mexico, and they sprayed plants with this herbicide that they thought would kill them. But it didn’t kill them all. What it did was load the plants with poison.

The government basically said, “Oh well.” This was basically the government response to the poisoning in the 1920s. “Oh well, you’re an evil lawbreaker. If you get poisoned, that’s your problem.”

GL: What do you think this all says about prohibition and the war on drugs?

DB: It shows that moral crusades are really dangerous. People really do believe that they’re on the side of the angels, and that the ends justify the means.

But what did Prohibition accomplish? Nothing good, as far as we can tell. Again, the prohibition of marijuana encourages the same kind of illegal industry that Prohibition did in the 1920s. My feeling is that it’s really hard to legislate human behavior.

I don’t want to assign evil to this entirely. People genuinely believed that if they put the right moral code into legislation, they could change society for the better.

But there is a sort of classist, ethnic component to this. Certainly, people have made the case that early on the primary users of marijuana in the United States were African American. Those early drug laws and the underpinnings of our anti-marijuana crusade were rooted in that.

If you look at Prohibition, the people who were most hurt were also poor city dwellers. Out in the mountains of Georgia, people just brewed their own distillery. The real impact of Prohibition and poisoned alcohol was on poorer people in the cities.

GL: What is the takeaway from this moment in history?

DB: Prohibition was a failed experiment. The lesson was we really can’t do that. When we did it, we had all sorts of unintended consequences.

New Yorkers celebrate the end of Prohibition. (Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

We need to know that our government is capable of these things. Let’s not be naive about it. If you can go back 100 years and see the government seems okay with sacrificing American citizens to enforce its laws, that is worth remembering.

Fact check: It’s true, U.S. government poisoned some alcohol during Prohibition

The claim: The US government intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition

Historical facts can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Even claims that at first sound conspiratorial can be rooted in well-documented history and records.

“The government once poisoned drinking alcohol to get people to stop drinking,” a Facebook post shared almost 500 times reads.

The federal government sometimes proved willing to go to unethical lengths to prevent alcohol consumption. While the government never directly poisoned drinking alcohol, it did take steps to ensure that toxic chemicals were included in industrial alcohols.

Such chemicals were commonly converted into drinking alcohol during the Prohibition era, a reality of which officials were aware when approving the practice.

Enforcing Prohibition

For over a decade, the United States barred the production and sale of drinking alcohol in what became known as the Prohibition era. A temperance movement had existed in the United States since at least the 1830s, culminating in the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1920.

The federal government devoted significant resources to curtailing the bootlegging of alcohol, which became a very lucrative illicit business for crime syndicates like the Mafia.

While increasing pressure from sellers and illegal importation of alcohol somewhat limited the supply of beverages, demand remained strong with speakeasies and smuggling networks arising as quickly as they were squashed.

Law enforcement and regulators also devised a new strategy for limiting the supply of alcohol at its source. Bootleg alcohol during the Prohibition era was overwhelmingly produced from distilled industrial alcohols. Officials reasoned that by mandating toxic additives into products which would be converted to bootleg alcohol, the supply could be effectively cut before consumption.

New York's 21 Club, a Prohibition-era speakeasy, had an elaborate system of levers to hide the bar shelves and tip incriminating liquor bottles into the sewer in case of a raid.

High demand for alcohol, accompanied by an unregulated black market, meant that sales of now-toxic bootleg liquors continued despite the additive poisons.

“On New Year’s Day 1927, 41 people died at New York’s Bellevue Hospital from alcohol-related poisonings. Oftentimes, they were drinking industrial methanol, otherwise known as wood alcohol, which was a legal but extremely dangerous poison,” a Time magazine retrospective on the Prohibition era reads.

“The federal government had required companies to denature industrial alcohol to make it undrinkable as early as 1906, but during Prohibition it ordered them to add quinine, methyl alcohol and other toxic chemicals as a further deterrent,” a History.com report on the era reads.

By the end of the decade, officials in the federal government adapted their strategies for enforcing Prohibition. In 1929, enforcement of Prohibition transferred from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department, which then launched massive crackdowns on organized crime in cities like Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

It was not until the repeal of the 18th amendment in 1933, however, that the federal government reversed course on its temperance policies. By then, Americans had been poisoned with intentionally contaminated liquor.

Our ruling: True

It is true that the federal government during the Prohibition Era mandated that industrial alcohols receive toxic additives, effectively poisoning future supplies of bootleg liquor. Enforcement of Prohibition was multipronged; alongside stringent law enforcement raids, tax auditing and surveillance of the illicit trade, regulators also actively participated. One result was the death of Americans from poisoned spirits. This claim is rated TRUE because it is supported by our research.

The U.S. Government Killed 10K People with Alcohol

Bootlegging was an inevitable result of 1920s Prohibition in the U.S. And when the government tried to solve the problem, they ended up with a solution that killed at least 10,000 Americans through poisoned, denatured industrial ethyl-alcohol. In this episode, we tell the story and then talk with Comedian Leslie Battle!

Prohibition in the United States began because of religion. Pieistic Protestants, which are similar to Lutherans really got the ball rolling on the banning of alcohol in America. They saw all these problems in America – the falling apart of families, violence, and political corruption as all starting with the bottle. So they took their movement to the political parties in America and found support in all of the parties. After a number of states outlawed alcohol, the Volstead Act federalized it and really put prohibition in place.

Basically, the 18th Amendment was ratified in January of 1919 which passed with 68% support in the House and 76% support in the Senate. It outlawed the production, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors, but it said nothing about consuming them. So the Volstead Act was passed shortly thereafter which had three main parts: 1) prohibiting intoxicating beverages such as liquor, beer and alcohol, 2) regulating the manufacture, production use and sale of alcohol for non-beverage purposes and 3) ensuring that there was enough alcohol available for scientific research, and non-beverage manufacturing uses. So after that – at midnight on January 17 of 1920, Prohibition was officially the new law and would remain that way for 13 years.

There were many side-affects of Prohibition. First of all, it was enforced unevenly. Much like modern day drug laws, it affected poor working class people much more than the wealthy elite. Rich people could have an entire cellar full of booze with little problem, but a working class family would get busted for getting caught with a bottle.

Bootlegging began to spread across the country. Immediately after prohibition went into affect, small portable stills were being sold all over America. There were more than 7,000 violations of the law on the books in the first 6 months. More than 30,000 speakeasies popped up in New York City alone. Some companies got creative to help people get their booze. For instance, the Vine-Glo company made bricks of concentrated grapes for grape juice. Not illegal, but if you let it sit for awhile, it would ferment and you’d get wine. How did people know how to do it? Well Vine-Glo wanted to make sure people knew how to keep their product from becoming illegal, so they printed the instructions right on the label to explain how to make wine out of their product. You know, so people could not do that. For the sake of the law.

If you wanted to drink legally, you get a medical license to drink alcohol. Much like a modern day weed card, it was easy to find a doctor to prescribe you alcohol.

For the rule-breakers, bootlegging continued, along with speakeasies, and all of this required people to transport the illegal booze around the country. Rum-running and bootlegging – here’s something I learned – rum-running refers to smuggling booze by water, bootlegging by land – I hadn’t heard that before. And in the case of bootlegging, rum that was manufactured – mostly in the mountains of Appalachia – needed to be distributed around the country, so people suped-up their cars to be able to evade the police. The guys who suped-up these cars became competitive about it, and this eventually led to what we now call NASCAR.

The government obviously didn’t like the idea that people were still trying to get their hands on alcohol. So they continued taking steps to make it difficult. One of these steps was modifying the alcohol used to make the drinks. A lot of bootleggers were stealing the alcohol that had been produced for industrial use, ethyl alcohol. So the government ordered the denaturation of alcohol products. This way the alcohol could still be used for industrial or non-beverage purposes, but would be undrinkable. Drinking the denatured alcohol would either just taste disgusting or would flat out make the drinker sick. But as people figured out ways to filter out the denaturing agents, the government got tougher. They put more and more deadly chemicals into it. One of these was the combination of methyl alcohol. 4 parts methanol, 2.25 parts pyridine base, and 0.5 parts benzene per 100 parts ethyl alcohol. When word of this got to New York Medical Examiners, they said don’t do it. People will die. But it didn’t stop them. We’re talking about a time when people were ingesting Sterno – the things that you see at buffet tables to keep the food hot – just for its alcohol content. Sure, it might make you a little sick, but if you’re an alcoholic, that’s the chance you take.

Well this particularly dangerous combination of ingredients in denatured alcohol ended up being a horrible idea.

I want to briefly talk about something that happened in the 1970s.

In 1969, the Nixon Administration decided to wage war against the marijuana that was flowing over the border from Mexico. One of the methods that the U.S. government came up with was to help Mexico spray the pot fields with a chemical agent that was intended to make the consumers of the product nauseous. That idea was eventually scrapped, but instead they started sending $15 million a year to Mexico’s drug authority for them to spray herbicides on the crop – namely a chemical called paraquat. The result was that Mexican weed growers just grew plants poisoned with paraquat and sold them anyway. Paraquat was known to cause kidney, liver, lung and heart failure and was later linked to Parkinson’s disease. The program extended well into the Reagan administration, who used the chemical on fields within the United States. It’s unknown how many Americans were disabled or killed from smoking marijuana laced with paraquat, but the chemical still exists today as one of the most common industrial weed killers on the market.

So in the 1920s, we can sort of think of the denaturing of alcohol for the purpose of making it horrible to drink as sort of a test run. On New Year’s Day, 1927, 41 people died in New York’s Bellevue Hospital from drinking industrial alcohol that had been poisoned with denaturing agents. People were getting alcohol anywhere they could and stealing this industrial alcohol was some of the most available, easiest liquor to score. 60 million gallons of the stuff was stolen annually for drinking, leading to deadly results. The New York City medical examiner, Charles Norris condemned the denaturing practice at a press conference. He said: “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol, yet 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.”

The first year, there were thousands of hospitalizations and 400 deaths attributed to drinking the poisoned alcohol. If people didn’t die, they were often facing paralysis or blindness. The second year, there were 700 deaths. And it kept rising.

When prohibition was finally lifted in 1933 through the 21st Amendment, the damage had been done. It’s tough to say how many people died from this, but conservative estimates put the number at around 10,000 over the period of 13 years. On the larger end, some people claim it to be around 30,000 deaths. One of the reasons it’s difficult to say is because some of those deaths could be due to alcohol poisoning by its very nature.

And like a lot of government policies, this affected the poor population in a much larger way than the wealthy. People who could afford it could attain liquor that was made without the industrial ethyl alcohol and would be fine. But the average working class American, if they wanted to drink, the only alcohol available had been poisoned by the government.

So that’s the story of how our government poisoned a bunch of Americans and how prohibition didn’t work.

Resources

pbs.org, Unintended Consequences of Prohibition”. By Michael Lerner; en.wikipedia.org, “Consequences of Prohibition.” By Wikipedia Editors; usatoday.com, “Fact check: It’s true, U.S. government poisoned some alcohol during Prohibition.” By Matthew Brown; https://theinternetsaysitstrue.com/2022/04/11/the-u-s-government-killed-10k-people-with-alcohol/, “The U.S. Government Killed 10K People with Alcohol.” By Micael Kent; vox.com, “The US government once poisoned alcohol to get people to stop drinking.” by German Lopez;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

How We Sold Our Soul–Dark Side of Prohibition: Government Poisoned Alcohol Killed Thousands

The Noble Experiment

Economics of Prohibition

Uneven Enforcement

The Greatest Consequence

History

Enforcement

Conspiracy theories

Effects and modern examples

The claim: The US government intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition

Enforcing Prohibition

Our ruling: True

Like this:

The Noble Experiment

Economics of Prohibition

Uneven Enforcement

The Greatest Consequence

History

Enforcement

Conspiracy theories

Effects and modern examples

The claim: The US government intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition

Enforcing Prohibition

Our ruling: True

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