[PBS Previews: Prohibition (3:26 to 3:45)]
The short answer to Daniel Okrent's question is, they couldn't; and this is why the US Government had to resort to putting kerosene and acetone in industrial alcohol to prevent people from drinking it.
Bonne heure-locale, mes amours, and welcome back to Repugnant Secrets. When I had made the first episode of this series, I dove in headfirst with a difficult story; the story of the Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal. In doing that video, though, it became apparent to me that, despite the public acknowledgement and awareness of the crimes committed by government officials and corporations alike in some circles, other circles might find the story absurd, hard to swallow. So for my next few videos in this series, I will be covering some very well-documented and even commonly known events in the history of corruption and crime. Today, we're starting with the Chemist's War of Prohibition.
On the 19th of October, 1919, the United States Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto and passed the Volstead Act, an amendment to the Constitution to "prohibit intoxicating beverages, and regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes, and to insure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye, and other lawful industries." Temperance advocates promised that Prohibition would usher in a beautiful new world in which crime, poverty, violence, marital abuse, industrial industries, illness and premature death statistics would all drop drastically. However, these promises did not come true -- much to the contrary, it actually made most of these problems worse in the long-run, and created new problems in the form of bootlegging rackets and mob violence. And while initially, alcohol consumption dropped by nearly 40% in the early years of Prohibition, by the mid-1920's doctors had become accustomed to alcohol poisoning as one of their most common public health issues, as alcoholism rates soared.
Bootleg whiskies and gins often made people very sick: whether it be from the homemade stills tainting the alcohol with metals and other impurities, or the common tactic of bootleggers to steal licensed denatured alcohol and employ chemists to "re-nature" the alcohol, often very poorly, alcohol became more dangerous to consume than it ever had been when it was legal.
But in the winter of 1926, doctors began seeing new symptoms, and far more fatalities, related to alcohol consumption; symptoms and fatalities that had nothing to do with poor-quality re-naturing or metal impurities in the alcohol.
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."
In 1926, more than 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually by bootleggers. Under President Coolidge's administration, the US Government responded by escalating their denaturing regulations, requiring industrial alcohol be mixed with methyl alcohol and other poisonous chemicals, in order to make the alcohol undrinkable. But as the government escalated their regulations for the production of industrial alcohol, so too did the bootleggers escalate their hiring of better and better chemists who could redistill the alcohol into a consumable, non-fatal drink.
By 1927, new denaturing formulas had been pushed forward by the government. These included poisons including kerosene, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department had also demanded more methyl alcohol be added to these formulas -- up to 10% of the total product.
The medical examiner for New York City at the time, Charles Norris, even held an impromptu press conference regarding the rising death toll, stating, "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol, yet it continues the 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."
This death toll was by no means small. In New York City, 1926, 1200 were made ill by poisoned alcohol, and 400 died. In the following year, the death toll climbed to 700. And these numbers were echoed in cities across the country, leading to accounts of over 10,000 poisoned alcohol-related deaths each year between 1927 and 1933, when the Volstead Act was repealed. It was the first Amendment to the US Constitution to ever be repealed -- and with good reason. Senator James Reed of Missouri, when condemning the denaturing policies before Congress, is quoted as saying:
"Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even though he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statues."
What began as a well-intentioned moral implementation of law grew so far out of hand, that public health officials nationwide joined together to condemn the Volstead Act, the Treasury Department, and the Coolidge Administration as a whole for their involvement in what they saw as mass murder committed b the government. Bootleggers had mastered the redistilling and renaturing processes, making alcohol again safe before the repeal of the 18th Amendment in December of 1933, and with that repeal, the alcohol denaturing programs and regulations had ended. The government, after that, ceased to mention it, and like so many stories we will be discussing in this series, it became lost to the history books, the Wikipedia pages, and the tests of time.
But just because it goes unmentioned in the history books, does not mean it didn't happen. The United States government, so desperate to enforce an unenforceable law, turned to outright murderous methods to achieve its goals -- and hundreds in every major city each year died because of it.
If you'd like to learn more about the Chemist's War of Prohibition, I recommend reading The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-Age New York by Deborah Blum; in it, the author describes the fascinating story of how forensic medicine was born in the midst of so many alcohol-related deaths brought on by the government's denaturing programs, and goes into much greater detail than I can in a ten-minute video. A link to the book, as well as other sources used for the video, can be found below.
