26. The Deadly Impact of the Treasury Department’s Decision to Make Denatured Alcohol More Lethal
The US Treasury Department’s new formula made the process used by the bootleggers’ chemists up until that point to renature industrial alcohol all but useless, as it left them unable to separate out each of the harmful chemicals. On Christmas Eve, 1926, a single New York City hospital, Bellevue, was inundated with dozens of people who fell seriously ill after they drank contaminated alcohol. By New Year’s Eve, 1200 people in New York City had been sickened by poisonous alcohol, and at least 400 had died.
The city’s medical examiner assigned a toxicologist to examine confiscated whiskey, and based on the findings, issued an alert to warn the citizens that: “practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic“. The impact fell heaviest on the poor: the well-heeled could afford the best liquor available, such as real whiskey smuggled in from abroad. As the medical examiner noted, most of those harmed by the repurposed industrial alcohol were those: “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low-grade stuff“.
