Well, my understanding is that moonshine often does. But i agree, that’s not what makes moonshine harsh.
The whole point of aging whiskey in charred oak barrels that are porous enough to “breath” is to give it time for the congeners to oxidize into more agreeable byproducts.
I didn’t separate my issues very well. Thank you for fussing back.
Killing anyone is bad. But threatening the lives of hundreds versus millions is morally different.
Any action, or inaction, a national government does or doesn’t do is going to fairly directly kill or not kill somebody. Said another way, there are no zero death alternatives.
We’re already pregnant causers of death just because of the size and complexity of the problems. So now we’re just debating who and how many get the chop as a consequence of each possible decision path before us.
That number seems overwhelmingly high.
In 1926 New York City, 585 people died from this government action. Over 5000 fatalities from this poisoning, at least a 600% increase from the previous deaths from alcohol, were said to have resulted in the entire country.
Obviously, that’s a major human toll. But that’s in the same ballpark as the number of people dying in automobile accidents in NYC in 1926.
You did say “seeking” industrial alcohol, rather than actually using it, and that number is plainly speculative. Given the lethality of the substance, that low a death total either indicates that only a small section of the public was seeking it or only a fraction ever found it, out of the tens of millions of people flouting Prohibition rules. Nationally, even if that 5000 all occurred just in 1926 (other sources give a total over the decade at 10,000), it’s comparable to the number of heroin deaths now; about 0.3% of Americans are users.
I don’t want to minimize any unnecessary deaths, but the notion that the government was flooding the market with poison is wildly overblown.
Though “seeking industrial alcohol” I took to mean “seek illegal alcohol” that could easily be 50% of the population, and a large percentage of that illegal alcohol was derived from industrial alcohol. The situation was presumably the same as the current situation with drugs if you buy an oxycodone tablet from a dealer it could be an actual brand name oxycodone tablet or it could be something made in a basement lab somewhere full of fentanyl. You can end up a fentanyl overdose statistic without “seeking out” fentanyl
Or the bootleggers got better at removing the poisonous additives or diluting them enough so they weren’t lethal. Hence why the government increased the amount they were adding
However, if you know about it, you should try to ameliorate it, not be callous and uncaring.
No, the amount used wasnt enough to be deadly. So they increased it.
Once again, they made a move that they knew would cause a small number of deaths in order to knowingly prevent a much larger number of deaths. The actual death dealers were in fact the middlemen who peddled lethal hooch masquerading as the real thing.
I am hoping that you would be complaining just as loudly if instead the government refused to make an industrial substance - never intended to be used by humans and with long-standing nationwide warnings of its danger - lethal and the number of deaths continued to increase yearly, even though they could have saved those people.
In no-win situations, nobody wins. Sometimes the best result is fewer losers.
Do we know that? I’ve skimmed a few of these articles and not actually seen the details of what was added to what, and in what quantities. Methanol is poisonous anyway, and noxious substances are added nowadays to try and stop people drinking too much
Much larger number how- Drunkenness?
The difference is- Prohibition was a terrible idea, and they knew drinkers were gonna drink. Read Wheelers comments- he didnt care drinkers were dying.
Moonshine itself can be poisonous, depending on the distilling process.
[T]he stills don’t stay clean after the first run. Agents have found everything from animal carcasses to beehives in the sour mash; the stillhands simply cook it all together. Worse, much of the black-pot whiskey is already dangerous stuff, high in lead content and often distilled through unflushed car radiators.
For decades after the end of Prohibition we still had cultural memes of drinking (not the D.T.s from withdrawal, but drinking) causing hallucinations, blindness and other neurological symptoms of “bad hooch”.
I wasn’t aiming that at you, and apologize that it came across that way. My point was agreeing with yours: someone in the government obviously decided that it was fine to kill “drunks” (people addicted to alcohol.) They had demonized a section of the population and were fine with “indirectly” killing them. As long as the deaths could be blamed upon the bad actions of the deceased, it felt morally justified to them. Never mind that the government made the rule that made the action “bad.”
We are still doing this today. The government changed the rules so that health insurance could be run for profit. Then they failed to regulate it in any meaningful way such that denial of service could be decided by high school dropouts instead of doctors. Then the insurers realized that narcotics were a whole lot cheaper than surgery, that they would eventually get people fired, which gets them off the rolls, and that once narcotic prescriptions were on their record, every symptom could subsequently be dismissed as “drug seeking.”
Thus leading to the hundreds of thousands of Americans now addicted to street drugs as their only source of relief, and families destroyed and ending up homeless.
It’s exactly the same thing, just in a bigger context. Government rules, leading to dehumanization, leading to death and destruction. We are in a particularly foul morass of dehumanization right now. We just never seem to learn.
You mean like bad moonshine? 
This reminds me of when the US was spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with paraquat. When toxic paraquat was detected in the domestic street weed supply, there were a lot of people who thought that was a feature, not a bug of the irradiation plan.
Scaring two sets of people off industrial alcohol - the people using it to make hooch, who can’t sell to dead people and get a bad rep from doing so, and the people drinking hooch, some number of which would stop drinking stuff that was literally deadly - would lower the number of the deaths overall.
I say lower, not eliminate. No threats can do that completely. But the cost/benefit ratio was definitely in favor.
I’m astonished at the contention that moonshining costs the government millions in lost revenue. About the only reason to drink it is that it’s cheap– otherwise you could just pay for the legal stuff and get better product. Is that portion of the supply/demand curve really a market the government is being deprived of? Tax enforcement efforts to this end really seem more to fall into the category of “if we didn’t at least try to enforce the law it would be 20x worse”.
Bear in mind that article is well past the drinking age. 
Things may have changed since then.
If addicts in Russia make and use “krokodil”, there is absolutely nothing toxic enough to deter some people.
What an idiot that Mapcase guy is. If he had only written
someone could have taken him seriously.