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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT PURPOSELY POISONED AMERICAN CITIZENS DURING PROHIBITION! Due to the passage of the 18th Amendment, which made Prohibition the law of the land. The federal government poisoned alcohol in 1926, to curb consumption during Prohibition; by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, an estimated 10,000 people had died of this poisoning. When the manufacture and sale of alcohol was illegal between 1920 and 1933, regulatory agencies encouraged measures making industrial alcohol undrinkable, including the addition of lethal chemicals. DURING PROHIBITION ALCOHOL WAS PROHIBITED, SO THERE WAS NO LEGAL HUMAN CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOL. Did the United States government intentionally and fatally poisoned more than 10,000 of its own citizens between 1926 and 1933. The claim is that the U.S. government added poison to alcohol to discourage people from drinking it during Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 in which it was illegal to produce, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages anywhere in the United States. That didn’t mean people stopped making, buying, and drinking booze, they just did it illegally. As noted in virtually every U.S. history textbook ever written, one of the many negative unintended consequences of Prohibition was a booming black market in alcohol that law enforcement was never able to subdue. The question at hand: Did the federal government really add poison to alcohol to discourage people from drinking it? In-fact, it did. The government did purposely add poisonous substances to alcohol, and this did result in thousands of deaths during Prohibition. The practice was called 'denaturing'. It consisted of adding noxious chemicals to alcohol sold for industrial purposes to make it unfit for human consumption. The process, long used in Europe, was introduced in the United States as a means of exempting producers of alcohol used in paints, solvents, and the like from having to pay the taxes levied on potable spirits. Mainly, this was done by adding some methyl alcohol or 'wood alcohol' to grain alcohol, rendering it poisonous. Some formulas also contained substances that made the product taste too awful to drink. One of the ways crime syndicates tried to flout Prohibition, was by stealing industrial alcohol and finding ways to make it potable. The government, in turn, resorted to making it more poisonous. To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to 'renature' the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and re-distilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly. THIS WAS LIKE INTENTIONALLY POISONING A WELL IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT. By 1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons like kerosene and brucine, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly. SO IN FACT THEY DID PURPOSELY INTEND TO PUT PEOPLE AT RISK. As for the claim that some 10,000 people died of alcohol poisoning during Prohibition through its repeal in 1933, that estimate may or may not be true, though; 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 approximately 10,000 people. By that time prohibition lawmakers and public health experts of that era condemned what they described as a callous disregard for those who died as result of drinking denatured alcohol. |
