Protecting You from the Devil’s Brew
During Prohibition, criminal gangs began to steal industrial alcohol and redistill it to make it drinkable. The U.S. government’s response: Make industrial alcohol deadly.
This is from Slate:
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and 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.
Manufacturers were also forced to add more of the poisonous methyl alcohol — requiring at least 10%. By the time the Prohibition ended, it’s estimated that up to 10,000 people may have died from alcohol poisoning as a result of the federal decision to render industrial alcohol deadly.
Great stuff. The government is willing to kill people to enforce prohibition? And some folks still want it in charge of their health care?
I agree with Ken. Government is inherently dangerous. More dangerous by far tha alcohol.
What I find interesting is the hypocrisy of the whole thing:
Government: Alcohol is bad for you! It causes drunkenness and other social ills and can lead to moral degradation.
The People: Your law is arbitrary, and we’re going to drink no matter what you do.
Government: You’re so morally depraved that we’re going to kill you. And, because your crime is worse than that of a confirmed serial killer, you’ll deprive you of due process and a trial by your peers and go straight to death by poison.
For years we’ve all heard how (morally-deficient) people died during prohibition from poorly-made, bootleg alcohol. We were always led (or allowed) to believe the deaths were the result of unscrupulous bootleggers, speeding the distillation process by using lead-tainted automotive radiators. However, this is the first time I’ve heard that the deaths were mostly due to an unscrupulous federal government.