You might have seen this story in a meme, which would usually disqualify it from being anywhere close to the truth. And while it’s an oversimplification to say the US government deliberately poisoned its own citizens, Americans really did perish during Prohibition due to tainted alcohol – all under the government’s supervision.
Prohibition was made into law when Congress ratified the 18th Amendment in 1919. Of course, the law’s passing did little to stop people from drinking, and an underground economy of speakeasies supplied by bootleggers soon popped up. It was impossible to stamp out demand for liquor completely, so the federal government also tried to eliminate the supply. It did this by trying to make alcohol poisonous.
At the time, most bootleg alcohol was distilled from industrial alcohol like methanol, AKA wood alcohol. These alcohols were already dangerous to drink (which is why there were so many stories about Prohibition-era booze making people go blind), but the government decided to make them even more dangerous as a deterrent.
By 1927, federal guidelines required chemical companies to add several dangerous substances to their already highly toxic chemicals. These substances included kerosene, gasoline, brucine (an alkaloid similar to strychnine), benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The US Treasury Department also required that chemical formulas include up to 10% methyl alcohol, a chemical whose fatal dose can be as low as 25 milliliters.
Predictably, drinkers died. Sixty-six people lost their lives on Christmas Day 1926 from industrial alcohol poisoning, as did another 41 on New Year’s Day 1927. Some have claimed that 10,000 people perished from poisonous alcohol during Prohibition. It’s impossible to know exactly how many lost their lives due to these federal regulations, but the figure is likely well into the hundreds.
