America, here’s your government’s War on Alcohol and our “national experiment in the extermination” of alcohol users

Great post by Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem." 

"You probably never heard about this, but the US government actually intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition in an attempt to discourage people from drinking, and ended up killing 10,000 Americans in what has been described as: ) “our national experiment in extermination” and b) “the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history.” Here’s an excerpt from the Slate article “The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences” by by Deborah Blum:

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 accusto

med 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. [MP: Not unlike today and the overdose death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the 22 overdose fatalities in the Pittsburgh area from fentanyl-laced heroin.] 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.”

During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: “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.”

And just in case anybody is under the illusion that prohibiting alcohol or drugs reduces use and addiction, consider this paragraph from the article:

Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade’s end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country’s defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.

MP: This story about 10,000 Americans being fatally poisoned and exterminated by the US government during Prohibition is a perfect example of why wars on alcohol or drugs waged by the government aren’t wars against substances, but wars (with thousand of casualties and incarcerated Americans) against “otherwise innocent and peaceful Americans using arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants and weeds.” As I’ve written before, I’m confident that in a future, more enlightened, advanced, open-minded and tolerant America, we’ll look back on America’s senseless, failed, expensive and deadly Wars on Drugs and Alcohol, with shame, contempt and embarrassment for such cruel, intolerant and inhumane treatment of our fellow man."