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FILE 050 · VOL VIII · Your Great-Grandparents Were the Test
The Government Poisoned Alcohol on Purpose. 10,000 People Died.
When the law decides you deserve to die for breaking it, it will not tell you first.
Based on: Prohibition's Poisoned Alcohol
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate of a former Treasury Department chemist, Washington, D.C. |
|---|---|
| Contents | Laboratory notebook (1926 to 1927), a formula card, a family photograph (Christmas 1926) |
| Finder | Granddaughter |
| Status | The formula card was transferred to a university chemistry archive. A copy is held here. |
Recovered file
From 1920 to 1933, it was illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport alcohol for drinking in the United States. Americans kept drinking anyway. One of the main sources of bootleg liquor was industrial alcohol, the kind used in paints, solvents, fuels, and medicines, which was legal to produce. Bootleggers stole it by the millions of gallons, cleaned it up with chemists of their own, and sold it in speakeasies. [1]
To stop them, the federal government had long required industrial alcohol to be denatured, mixed with chemicals to make it undrinkable. In 1926, frustrated that the bootleggers' chemists kept removing them, the Treasury Department ordered the formulas made more lethal. Industrial alcohol would now contain more poisonous methyl alcohol, up to ten percent, along with other toxins. Methyl alcohol can cause blindness, organ failure, and death in small amounts. [1]
The government knew exactly what would happen. People would keep drinking, and some of them would die. It continued the program anyway.
Over the Christmas holiday in 1926, dozens of people in New York City alone fell ill from poisoned alcohol, and many of them died. The city's chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, held a press conference. He said that the government knew it was not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol, and yet it continued its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink were daily absorbing that poison. He called it our national experiment in extermination. [2]
By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the government's poisoning program is estimated to have killed at least ten thousand people. [1]
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
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