CAREY WEDLER

This alcohol was made toxic courtesy of the very same government that had made the substance illegal in the name of keeping the public safe. [And from using it as cheap, replenishable motor vehicle fuel rather that diminishing oil deposits]. 

One hundred years later, this abhorrent historical anecdote is so obscure it reads like a paranoid, unsourced conspiracy theory in a dubious internet forum.

(Yet it is in some history books).

Often, the State feigns repentance for its past crimes, from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery to even some of the CIA’s corporate coups. Small paragraphs — and sometimes even chapters — discuss these atrocities in public school textbooks, if only because they are so widely-known that institutions can no longer ignore them — lest the government’s illustrious stated goals of educating the citizenry be questioned. Still, many of the State’s most sinister

secrets remained buried.

Regardless, 41 people did die that New Year’s Day, and estimates suggest that anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 people were killed by government-poisoned alcohol in the 1920s — and the deaths were a direct result of policies the government imposed.

The 18th amendment, which banned the sale and production of alcohol, was ratified in 1919, spurred by the temperance movement and Americans’ weariness following World War I. The Volstead Act was passed shortly after as an “enforcement” act to ensure Congress could actually implement the amendment. The bill included provisions to poison alcohol so as to discourage people from drinking.

Denatured alcohol is generally a normal, drinkable alcohol with chemicals like quinine and methyl alcohol added to make it industrial — and therefore undrinkable. As far back as 1906, the Treasury Department (charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement) had already required manufacturers who wanted to avoid taxes levied on potable spirits to denature their alcohol. But by late 1919, the Volstead Act had created tangible incentive for manufacturers to produce poison liquor.

As Edward Behr documented in his book, Prohibition: 13 Years that Changed America, “Under Volstead Act provisions, the manufacture of denatured alcohol was not only legal, but tax exempt. The denaturing substance was usually methanol, and methanol was extremely poisonous. Three glasses could be lethal, explaining the steady rise in the death toll from 1920 onward.” The Volstead Act intentionally failed to include a provision that required a label warning of the poison.

It quickly became apparent that simply banning a substance could not impede its consumption (this should sound familiar, considering the decades-long failed Drug War). Though rates of alcohol consumption initially dropped, by the mid-1920s they had increased sharply, so the government stepped in to further “discourage” people from drinking. The strategy? Add more toxic chemicals.

As Deborah Blum, professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin noted, by mid-1927 “[t]he Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.”

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