Did prohibition officials poison drinkers?

Great Debates
1

I think Wheeler, the flagbearer of Prohibition, did so knowingly and deliberately.

That attitude was widespread. To many “dry” activists, the idea that people would still drink despite the danger was baffling. But others denounced the policy. Senator Edward Edwards from New Jersey accused both Wheeler and the federal government of “legalized murder.”

In April 1927, Popular Science magazine attempted to explain the furor. “Uncle Sam has been on trial before the bar of public opinion,” [observed writer Dr. Frederic Damrau]…“charged for no less a crime than willful and premeditated murder.” Damrau weighed the opinions of both sides, before stating that “the alcohol is made poisonous not with the idea of killing drinkers, but because the only known unremovable denaturant happens to be poisonous.” Federal chemists, meanwhile, were working to develop a noxious but non-lethal substance that could not be removed.

The poisonings soured many Americans on prohibition, and on the Anti-Saloon League. The League’s chairman, Wayne Wheeler, responded to news of the poisonings by saying “the government is under no obligation to furnish people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide.”

One senator, Edward I. Edwards of New Jersey, called the federal government’s actions “legalized murder.” But as reports emerged in 1927 of drinkers becoming seriously ill or dying because of methyl alcohol, Wayne B. Wheeler, of the Anti-Saloon League, shrugged off anyone drinking industrial alcohol as committing “suicide,” and said “to root out a bad habit [meaning drinking alcohol of any kind] costs many lives and long years of effort.”

A calculated, callous response, since of course a drinker would have to know that the industrial alcohol available in 1926 is now far more poisonous and deadly than in 1925. Knowing that would require a way of being informed—news reports in newspapers and on the radio. And that, in turn, requires access to those sources and the ability to read, which depends on the drinker’s station in life.

To be precise, the Federal Government did not directly give poisoned alcohol to imbibers. But it did purposefully poison the industrial alcohol supply, knowing full well that foolhardy or unwitting drinkers would consume the dangerous and deadly alcohol.

Do you agree? or is it- they had it coming?

2

Lots of substances that could be drunk are poisonous. If you’re not making someone drink it, you’re not poisoning them.

3

If the poison was already in the alcohol, then that is ignorance.
If on the other hand the poison was deliberately added and the proper notice was not made widely and in a timely manner, I would call that murder.

4

I think the title is a bit sensationalist - no, they didn’t poison alcohol drinkers, but apparently per your links, they didn’t have a lot of sympathy for people drinking industrial chemicals. And while I’m largely a fan of our current attitudes of “better safe than sorry” labeling and packaging, you’re speaking of an era where the FDA and similar agencies had pretty much no power. This is the same generation that killed people by letting them drink Radithor!

5

One of my articles claims that was the case. I mean, there was notice- IF you could read, and IF you bought that newspaper. Somewhere around 1/3 of adults were not that literate back then. And buying a major city newspaper wasn’t available to all.

Sure, a little, I admit. But did they get the news out to everyone? I mean, why poison the booze in the first place if you dont think someone will die?

6

Why poison the booze anyway? There’s no reason to do that other than to make it dangerous and therefore no legitimate reason. Getting the word out is a nonsense cover for it.

7

Don’t you realize they do exactly the same thing today? It’s called denatured alcohol and used for fuel and solvents:

8

Which is why I included a link to Radithor - this is an era largely before any well regulated consumer protections. It was the sort of “personal responsibility/choice” that modern political minds claim to desire, but at horrific costs to people, often the most vulnerable. NOTE - I’m not saying I approve (see my comments in favor of “better safe than sorry” packaging) but the attitude towards drinkers of industrial alcohol was the norm, NOT the exception for that era.

It’s always difficult to judge a historical event by modern norms. That’s not to say we can’t, or even shouldn’t, but the perspective of 100 years ago about personal choice and risk is very different.

9

I don’t condone what the government did - many of the prohibitionists were insane religious types - but huge numbers of products that contain alcohol are made deliberately undrinkable and for good reasons. Industrial alcohol was unfit for human consumption, with effects up to and including death.

If anybody bothers to read the OP’s first cite - I seem to be the first (it went up to two as I typed) - you’ll clearly see that the government had tried several non-lethal additives but bootlegger chemists had cleverly devised ways of taking them out, entirely or mostly, and since industrial alcohol wasn’t taxed it was much cheaper than alternative drinkable alcohols. Only this totally illegal booze was reaching drinkers but the toll was already a national scandal. Apparently no way was findable in the 1920s to get around this.

As the federal government introduced formula after formula, chemists managed to distill out the danger. According to Blum, by 1926, the federal government had retired three formulas entirely, since bootlegger chemists had gotten so good at distilling them away.

By Christmas 1926, it was impossible to ignore the crisis. In New York alone, dozens of people died from drinking during holiday festivities.

The proper solution was to eliminate Prohibition, but that took another Constitutional amendment and nobody in the 1920s believed that was possible. Trying to spread the word that no foolin’, this time it’s really gonna kill you, was an extreme response to be sure. Nevertheless it did push the illegal chemists to find other ways of making hooch in a hurry. Lives were probably saved overall.

This makes a good “trolley problem” a century after the fact, but the real world throws up trolley problems every day that can’t be easily shrugged off.

10

True. But the facts are they did poison the alcohol, and they knew full well people would drink it. And Wheeler was clear in that he didn’t care.

11

Prohibition resulted in a lot of people being sickened or killed by bad booze - but a lot of the trouble was caused by bootleggers’ products that had nothing to do with government-mandated adulterants.

Example: the Jamaica ginger that caused paralysis in thousands of people. The government fix for people misusing Jamaica ginger (a patent medicine with high ethanol content) was an apparently harmless but bitter-tasting ginger resin additive. A manufacturer decided to use a chemical in his Jamaica ginger formulation that was supposed to be non-toxic - but tragically wasn’t.

12

There was a furor at the time, so this isn’t an instance of imposing present standards or mores on the past. And the 1906 passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act shows that the laissez faire attitude of “personal responsibility” or caveat emptor was no longer the predominant public spirit by the 1920s.

13

I think it’s more a sign that things were changing but as always in America, that there wasn’t much care when it was happening to those that weren’t deemed important. So Radithor became a cause for concern when famous, rich people became ill from the source. Prohibitionists didn’t care much when it was happening to “those” drunks who were drinking industrial alcohol while the wealthier could manage higher quality / smuggled drinks. Or, fast forward to AIDS when there was little public support or worry as long as it was happening to those people (homosexuals).

This nation (and we’re not alone) has a remarkable ability to not care about horrors as long as it’s not happening to us, see our huge thread on Leopards Eating Faces. Given enough horror, spread wide enough, or with enough social/political clout, and yes, we’ll change our minds on one specific issue, but the greater point of caring what happens to people who are “breaking the law (social or legal)” has been a resounding “meh” from a nearly immoveable fraction of the population in the 1920s and certainly now.

See our current administration’s efforts to roll back a huge array of social, environmental, legal and economic protections.

14

… To the thunderous applause of a sizeable fraction of the populace.

15

Its not completely cut and dried. I mean there are still regulations that force companies to add toxic substances to industrial alcohol, so as i understand it this was more a matter of degree (as in during prohibition the government forced makers if industrial alcohol to add MORE poison than before)

IIRC during Covid this caught out liquor distillers who wanted to make hand sanitizer, as in order to get FDA approved they needed to ensure the end product had noxious substances in it, and avoiding having noxious substances in the end product is the overriding number one of any liquor distillery.

16

The distillation process typically produces a fraction that has a high methanol percentage, which responsible distillers throw away. If they didn’t, or even worse sold the reject fraction to anyone fool enough to buy it, the booze could be anywhere from bad to outright poisonous. Even at the best of times raw unaged still liquor could be a pretty harsh product.

17

I’ll argue that the important “matter of degree” was that pre-prohibition, none but the lowest of what we’d now call “homeless” were seeking out industrial alcohol for drinking. A very small fraction of the populace and one that lots of people were willing to sweep under the rug as “acceptable collateral damage”.

During prohibition, that fraction of people seeking industrial alcohol ballooned to, IDK, 50% of the entire US population?

Knowingly adding poisons to stuff a few winos were likely to imbibe and knowing adding poisons to something half of middle class America was likely to imbibe are two very different scales of Evil.

18

I used to use methanol in a lab. (Also ethanol, which was 95% ethanol and bore a tax sticker.) Methanol does not make the product “harsh”. Rather to my surprise, the methanol smelled nicer than the ethanol.

19

Not everybody thinks so. Some us hold human life sacred, even for demonstrably bad people. Some of us see all humans as equal, rich or poor, fat or skinny, Braves or Yankees fans.

20

Does the whisky, aged or not, have so much methanol one would notice? I would be concerned. The raw product is “harsh” for other reasons.