27. The US Treasury Department Upped Its Game to Make Industrial Alcohol Far More Poisonous Than it Had Been Before
Liquor did not disappear from America because of Prohibition: massive amounts of drinkable booze were smuggled into the country by bootleggers. However, Prohibition did at least succeed in interrupting the supply chain, and even smuggling on a massive scale was not enough to meet the demand. So bootleggers began to produce massive amounts of liquor in the United States from stolen or otherwise diverted stocks of industrial alcohol. By the mid 1920s, the US Treasury Department, tasked with the enforcement of Prohibition, estimated that around 60 million gallons of industrial liquor were stolen each year. Bootleggers then employed chemists to “renature” it, and return it to a drinkable state.
Stolen and re-distilled industrial alcohol became America’s primary source of liquor. So in late 1926, the Treasury Department decided to up its game and revamp the denaturing formulas used to make industrial alcohol undrinkable. The new mix included known toxins such as acetone, quinine, formaldehyde, nicotine, zinc, camphor, chloroform, zinc, iodine, kerosene, and gasoline. Most dangerous of all, the new formula required that at least 10% of the total volume must consist of methyl alcohol or methanol, commonly used today in antifreeze. The results were disastrous.
