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Title: The Chemist's War
Source:
Slate
URL Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/?GT1=38001
Published: Feb 19, 2010
Author: Deborah Blum
Post Date: 2010-02-22 20:28:30 by Dakmar
Keywords: None
Views: 97
Comments: 4
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat. Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season. Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government. Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
You should always pay up a little for the good hooch and buy from a reputable dealer Show Me Obama's Birth Certificate!
a to the c to the f-ing machine?
"If you think 9/11 "truth" is on the brink of wide acceptance you are in for a huge disappointment" - Mister Clean 02/22/10
"You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun."-- Al Capone
Show Me Obama's Birth Certificate!
I almost landed a job killing cavity creeps once, until that self-righteous crest cult took over law enforcement in the entire county, or at least that's what I was told by the school nurse. I'll believe anyone wearing an armband...
"If you think 9/11 "truth" is on the brink of wide acceptance you are in for a huge disappointment" - Mister Clean 02/22/10
by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
#2. To: Flintlock (#1)
#3. To: Dakmar (#2)
#4. To: Flintlock (#3)
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