The "Chemist's War"

A horrifying episode from Prohibition, yet virtually forgotten:

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."

As a side note, I was recently studying up on denatured alcohol. Interestingly enough, the "denaturing" process is quite different in the USA and other countries, such as the UK. In the USA, color isn't added, which would seem to increase the danger of unintended ingestion. Nor, apparently, anything that gives the stuff an awful taste -- another safety measure. What I was actually looking for, however, was any exemption for industrial or workshop applications where the addition of the usual denaturing ingredients -- methanol, in particular -- might be problematical. Couldn't find any, so it appears any craftsman wanting to use pure ethanol has to pay the Federal booze excise tax on the stuff (and I do know several fine woodworkers who do just that).

Posted by David on February 22, 2010 11:01 AM