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The US Government Poisoned Alcohol to Enforce Prohibition

Khalid Elhassan October 10, 2021 35 min

Patrons enjoying drinks at the Hunt Club. a speakeasy with a filing system listing their 23,000 eligible customers which is checked before a customer gets through the door at this venue that is protected from police prohibition raids. Vintage News Daily

Label on denatured alcohol, poisoned by the US government to enforce prohibition. Mob Museum

28. Industrial vs Drinking Alcohol

Wherever we go, alcohol is bound to be near us. Even for those who don’t drink and have no beer or wine in their fridges or liquor in their cabinets, alcohol is found as an additive in their fuel tanks, and many household products such as nail polish, disinfectants, hand sanitizers, and perfumes contain alcohol. In 1906, the authorities had mandated that chemicals be added to grain alcohol intended for industrial use, to make it undrinkable. Alcohol thus treated is known as “denatured” alcohol or “wood spirits”. The mandate was met with little resistance from the manufacturers of industrial alcohol.

The addition of chemicals to their stocks to denature them made them exempt from the liquor taxes imposed on drinkable alcohol, so they were more than happy to comply. People determined to remove chemical additives from denatured industrial alcohol could do so if they really wanted to, and some did – a process known as “renaturing”. However, with legal alcohol readily available, and often quite cheap, the incentive to go through the trouble – especially on a large scale – was simply not there. All that changed with the enactment of Prohibition, and the resultant scarcity of regular drinkable booze.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.