During Prohibition in an effort to scare people away from drinking alcohol, the
American government oncepoisoned certain alcohol supplies; this
resulted in the death of over 10,000 American Citizens.
This,
of course, was during Prohibition. The government became frustrated
with the fact that despite the manufacture, sale, and transportation of
alcohol being banned, the number of people drinking alcoholic beverages
was markedly higher than it was before Prohibition. So to try to get
people to stop drinking, the government decided to try a scare tactic.
One
way bootleggers of this time made alcoholic beverages was to use
denatured, industrial alcohol as the base. Denaturing the alcohol is
simply a process to make it undrinkable, usually by adding something
that makes it taste or smell disgusting or will induce vomiting. This
was originally done (and is still done to this day) in order to allow
companies to get around having to pay the high taxes associated with the
manufacturing and sale of alcohol meant to be drunk. Alcohol used
industrially, for non-beverage applications, are denatured and thus,
they don't have to pay these taxes and so it is significantly cheaper,
gallon for gallon. Without this tax break, literally thousands of
industrial products would become drastically more expensive than they
currently are.
During prohibition, this denatured alcohol was often stolen from
companies that made industrial alcohol used in various paints and
solvents and the like. The bootleggers would then have their own
chemists whose job it was to make the alcohol palatable again, basically
undoing the denaturing process or to "renature" the alcohol.
With an estimated 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol stolen
annually in the 1920s to be later renatured and sold as drinkable
alcohol, the government, under President Coolidge, decided to up the
stakes and make some of the denaturing formulas lethal, instead of just
designed to make the alcohol unpalatable. To do this, they'd generally
add things like methyl alcohol (the main denaturing chemical at 10%
added, even today); other chemicals added are things such as kerosene,
brucine, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, formaldehyde, chloroform, carbolic
acid, acetone, and many others that were difficult for the bootlegger's
chemists to get out when they'd renature the alcohol.
After the first 100 or so people died shortly after the new denaturing
process was released around Christmas, health officials were outraged
and the news media picked up the story as intended. Unfortunately, the
government's plan didn't quite work from that point on. It didn't scare
people away from drinking and rather had little to no effect on
people's consumption of alcohol; instead, the estimates are that it
resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people with a much larger number
severely sickened and many blinded by the poisoning.
As New York City's medical examiner Charles Norris stated: "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." (Chuck Norris
fighting the man even back then)
People at the time, though, were split on the poisoning program, even
with the deaths that were happening because of it. One side felt that
the people who were drinking the illegal alcohol got what they deserved,
particularly because they knew the risks and broke the law anyways; the
other side felt it was a national experiment on exterminating members
of society that the government felt were undesirable as American
citizens. As one Chicago Tribune article in 1927 stated: "Normally, no
American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the
curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are
considered justified."
The United States government knew full well that
people would be drinking this poisoned alcohol and they hoped the deaths
that resulted from this would scare other people away from drinking.
Further, when it was clear that it wasn't scaring anyone away from
drinking and literally thousands were dying per year with significantly
more than that severely sickened, they kept the program going anyways,
though it was hotly debated in Congress.
So next time you start thinking the U.S. government would NEVER do something so evil as assassinate their own citizens. Think again!
excerpted from http://gizmodo.com/
excerpted from http://gizmodo.com/
