I heard on a podcast today that during the depression (or prohibition) people drank rubbing alcohol which created serious health effects. So to keep people from drinking it, the government required added poison to it as a deterrent - making it even more dangerous.
Is this really true? It seems an odd solution to the problem.
There’s a long-standing belief in American justice and policy that punishment is an effective deterrent. “Consequences” will keep people from doing something you don’t want them to do.
The fact you don’t want them to do it “for their own good”, and the fact that poisoning them is antithetical to their well-being, and the fact that these goals are mutually incompatible, doesn’t enter into the equation.
Besides, if they die, you can certainly argue they’re deterred from now on. Being dead is a very definitely solution to many behavior problems.
Wiki says -
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The “poison” they were adding was probably something like a bitterant that makes it taste so bad that only the most motivated alcoholic is going to drink it. If you’re just drinking recreationally, maybe you’ll find a different source that doesn’t have denatonioum in it.
Similarly, you’ll often see ‘cooking wine’ in stores that don’t otherwise sell alcohol. It’s not poisonous, it just has so much salt in it that it’s not drinkable and stores can sell it without having to get a liquor license.
I thought it was more of a CYA thing. They can say ‘we told you not to drink this, we put a warning on the label explaining that you shouldn’t drink it, we even made it taste horrific so you wouldn’t drink it’. At some point there’s not a whole that can be done to prevent someone from drinking it. I wonder if it would have helped if they stopped calling it alcohol, since people just assume it’s the same as what’s in beer/wine/liquor.
I thought I’ve read that some pharma companies started reducing how much APAP is in their drugs so when people take a ton of, say, vicodin, they’re not ODing on the APAP and wrecking their liver in the process.
Is it true? More or less. Denatured ethanol was a thing. And some people knew making it stronger would kill people but came up with justifications (as is often the case) for it.
That’s a stupid take. This isn’t about punishment, it’s pragmatism. Drinking something toxic that is tasty and doesn’t kill you immediately but will lead to serious long term effects up to and including death should be discouraged. Some people are sick, confused, or children and they don’t read labels.
By making the thing repellent to even taste solves that problem. You might try it, but before you consumed enough of the poison to be lethal you’ll almost certainly retch. No one would casually sip it thinking they’ll get a buzz.
Put down the stupid agenda.
“Denatonium”??? Seriously? Sounds like an obviously fake word.
And then I looked it up. Whew! Interesting stuff!!!
To a hard-core alcoholic, I doubt that taste will have any deterrent effect on them. When you’re in the throes of alcoholism and your body is physically addicted to it, it’s not you want alcohol, you need alcohol, and you don’t really care what its taste is because you just want to feel “normal” again. Maybe if it physically completely made you incapable of drinking through an emetic, I suppose. But even then, I’d think many would have a go at it. (I speak with some experience on this matter, having hit the vanilla and cooking wines loaded with salt in the middle of the night to make the withdrawal sensations go away. I never did make it to mouthwash, though.)
That’s what bittering agents do, make it nigh on impossible to consume regardless of one’s motivation. Denatonium is considered an emetic. You don’t even really hear about suicides chugging denatured alcohol as a method, anti-freeze is the more common option since it’s sweet and until recently didn’t include a bittering agent. Certainly alcoholics might go to absurd lengths, but this is all about harm reduction. There are no magic bullets, if it stops kids and some percentage of alcoholics then it worked.
The main quibble is with @gnoitall’s asinine take.
Denaturing alcohol might not deter those with the most extreme stage of alcohol addiction, but making it taste terrible is going to deter most people.
The main purpose of denaturing alcohol is not to poison people but to make it unpalatable.
Not rubbing alcohol – that’s isopropyl, which a.) isn’t really potable and b.) won’t get you drunk.
Denatured alcohol is ethanol 9the kind you drink) to which some adulterant has been added that will make you sick if you drink it – benzene was one they used to use. I don’t know what they use now.
When I was a kid, with a basement lab, the books required me to use denatured alcohol, presumably so I wouldn’t be tempted to drink it.
Denaturing alcohol still didn’t stop people. You can distill the adulterants out. In fact, during Prohibition (when, according to my grandparents, practically everyone in town was a bootlegger – my grandparents included) several town officials were caught in a scheme where they bought denatured alcohol in bulk, took it to a chemical plant to distill out the denaturing, then sold the now-pure ethanol in New York City. A sweet scheme.
By the way, you CAN get pure ethanol for chemical or biological work if it’s required. When I was at the University of Utah, they kept metal cans of absolute ethanol in a locked filing cabinet (all other supplies were easily accessible), and you had to sign them out. There were liquor control stamps pasted across the cap.
Small nitpick - Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol. Denatured alcohol is ethanol with denaturing agents added in. The ethanol without the denaturing agent is the alcohol we drink. Though I suppose the alcohol we drink is not JUST ethanol but ethanol in water with other things that taste good.
Regardless, they are two different chemicals. Don’t drink rubbing alcohol. It’s poison, way more than ethanol is. (isopropyl alcohol has an LD50 in rats of 5045 mg/kg and ethanol has an LD50 in rats of 7060 mg/kg)
ETA: Ninja’d
Though I have another note for you. Ethanol and water make an azeotrope with is really tough to break. You can get about 95% Ethanol via normal distillation then you have to do some extra stuff to get more than that.
Why do you call it a stupid take? Did you read the linked article?
The denaturing agents used today are indeed intended to make it taste awful, not make it deadly. But during prohibition, the government purposely added deadly poisons to alcohol - not only to make it taste vile, but to kill people (or more broadly, to scare other potential drinkers who saw what happened to people who did). One of the most “successful” was methanol, which tastes like ethanol (drinking alcohol) and does not impart a bad (or even noticeable) taste.
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.
…Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
Yes it will. If you can get past the horrific burn in your esophagus and the sickness it can cause, isopropyl will cause intoxication. I’ve had to deal with homeless drunks who mixed it with water and drink mix to make street punch. Considering how cheap booze is in my location I wonder why anyone would try this.
The alcohol in mouthwash will get you off as well. The dollar store variety used to be 28% which is 56 proof, quite a wallop. We used to see bums drinking it all the time. I believe the amount has been lowered to like 5% which makes a bottle of it more expensive than beer with higher ABV which is why we rarely see anyone drinking it anymore.
Back when I worked at a clinic specializing in drug treatment we had one guy who’s poison of choice was isopropyl alcohol. He didn’t even dilute it. It was cheap for a homeless drunk to buy and when he didn’t have money he’d shoplift it. Certainly wasn’t drinking it for the flavor. Just more proof that if something can make you high or buzzed there’s someone out there who will use and abuse it.
We had a simulpost. My response was to the first reply, not the latter couple. So the link hadn’t been posted when I responded.
That said, the point remains. Characterizing this as “the gummint is evil” is bullshit. They did it to curb the abuse of a controlled and industrial substance.
Yes, prohibition was a stupid policy. Making industrial products undrinkable (and harder to distill to make safe) however is not about punishment or summary execution without due process.
They didn’t make it undrinkable, though. Ethanol+methanol is perfectly drinkable, and depending on the circumstances you might not even notice that it contains methanol.
Wayne Wheeler, the architect of the poisoning said this about his program:
“The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable, when the Constitution prohibits it,” he told the press. “The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide.” Daniel Okrent, Closing Time: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, my copy.
From Wikipedia:
Wheeler opposed the use of non-fatal substances such as soap, and argued that fatal poisons in industrial alcohol was an acceptable measure because the government was under no obligation to protect the lives of its citizens if they broke the law by consuming alcohol. Between 10,000 and 50,000 deaths resulted…
We have different definitions of evil, then. They curbed the abuse of a controlled substance by killing people.
They didn’t just add methanol. They also added benzene and other chemicals as cited above. The goal was to make it unpalatable…and dangerous. The implication that they wanted to secretly make it poisonous isn’t supported by facts.
Wayne Wheeler was never a member of the US Government, legislature or law enforcement. Using his words to explain the policy is misleading.
There’s also the fact that this policy wasn’t implemented in secret. It’s not a “scare tactic” (i.e. terrorism) in that they wanted to use the the deaths to instill fear into the drinking public, they simply acknowledged that this would probably lead to deaths. Some of the demagogues and deplorables of the time decided to add their own commentary to it.
Prohibition included plenty of bad behavior by law enforcement and the government already, adding this conspiracy theory nonsense isn’t necessary.