29. The Decision to Poison Industrial Alcohol
Despite Prohibition, America saw a rise in the consumption of alcohol in the mid-1920s. The law was openly flouted, with too many speakeasies to count let alone raid, supplied by bootleggers who acted with impunity and near open defiance of law enforcement. So the federal authorities decided to go after a key source of the illegal booze: the still legal industrial alcohol stocks. In its industrial form, such alcohol is undrinkable, but bootleggers had figured out ways to make it fit for human consumption. So in 1926, the federal authorities mandated that the amount of harmful chemicals in industrial alcohol be greatly increased.
The results were immediate. During the Holiday Season that year, emergency rooms across the country saw an unprecedented spike in alcohol poisoning. By New Year’s Eve, 1926, New York City alone saw many fatalities. As the city’s medical examiner put it: “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what bootleggers are doing with it and 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“.
