Crapaganda.com

It was the period in the history of the United States known as Prohibition, from 1920-1933. During this time, the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol for consumption was banned throughout the US as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Noble Experiment was a colossal failure.  As public use of alcohol was illegal, all drink was driven underground.  Syndicated crime sky rocketed, as the need to provide illegal liquor increased.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

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.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

Read the rest of the story at: The Chemist’s War (Slate)

Watch Prohibition – The Last War on Drugs