When the U.S. Government Poisoned Over 10,000 Americans (On Purpose)
The federal government sometimes proved willing to go to unethical lengths to prevent alcohol consumption. While the government never directly poisoned drinking alcohol, it did take steps to ensure that toxic chemicals were included in industrial alcohols.
Such chemicals were commonly converted into drinking alcohol during the Prohibition era, a reality of which officials were aware when approving the practice. For over a decade, the United States barred the production and sale of drinking alcohol in what became known as the Prohibition era. A temperance movement had existed in the United States since at least the 1830s, culminating in the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1920. The federal government devoted significant resources to curtailing the bootlegging of alcohol, which became a very lucrative illicit business for crime syndicates like the Mafia.
While increasing pressure from sellers and illegal importation of alcohol somewhat limited the supply of beverages, demand remained strong with speakeasies and smuggling networks arising as quickly as they were squashed.
Law enforcement and regulators also devised a new strategy for limiting the supply of alcohol at its source. Bootleg alcohol during the Prohibition era was overwhelmingly produced from distilled industrial alcohols. Officials reasoned that by mandating toxic additives into products which would be converted to bootleg alcohol, the supply could be effectively cut before consumption. High demand for alcohol, accompanied by an unregulated black market, meant that sales of now-toxic bootleg liquors continued despite the additive poisons.
"On New Year's Day 1927, 41 people died at New York's Bellevue Hospital from alcohol-related poisonings. Oftentimes, they were drinking industrial methanol, otherwise known as wood alcohol, which was a legal but extremely dangerous poison," a Time magazine retrospective on the Prohibition era reads.
"The federal government had required companies to denature industrial alcohol to make it undrinkable as early as 1906, but during Prohibition it ordered them to add quinine, methyl alcohol and other toxic chemicals as a further deterrent," a History.com report on the era reads.
Prohibition Was Dumb. Poisoning People Was Dumber.
Prohibition in the United States was already a questionable experiment—an attempt to legislate morality by banning alcohol in 1920. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the U.S. government somehow decided that the best way to enforce this ban was to poison the very people they were supposed to protect.
The Black Market Booze Boom
As soon as alcohol became illegal, people did what people do best: they found a way around the law. Enterprising bootleggers figured out that a great source of alcohol was industrial-grade ‘denatured’ alcohol—the kind used in paint, solvents, and cleaning supplies. The only difference? This alcohol had been intentionally treated with chemicals to make it undrinkable, allowing manufacturers to avoid liquor taxes.
But where there’s a will (or a thirst), there’s a way. Black market chemists developed methods to ‘renature’ this industrial alcohol, effectively removing the additives and making it drinkable again—if not exactly safe, at least less likely to make your stomach feel like it had been scrubbed out with turpentine.
Naturally, the government wasn’t thrilled about this workaround.
The “Brilliant” Solution: Make It Lethal
Calvin Coolidge’s administration decided that since people were still drinking alcohol, the best way to enforce Prohibition wasn’t to better police illegal production or address public demand, but rather to poison the supply. Without making it public, federal chemists began adding even more dangerous chemicals to industrial alcohol—things like methyl alcohol (wood alcohol), kerosene, gasoline, chloroform, and carbolic acid. These weren’t just substances that made alcohol taste nasty; they were substances that could kill you outright or leave you blind and brain-damaged.
And the government knew full well that this tainted alcohol would still make its way to the black market and, eventually, into people’s drinks. The entire strategy hinged on the idea that enough people would die that others would get scared and stop drinking.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.
People Kept Drinking—And Dying
The first wave of deaths was alarming, but instead of deterring drinkers, it just made headlines. By the mid-1920s, more than a thousand people were dying every year from government-poisoned alcohol, with thousands more suffering from permanent blindness and neurological damage. Medical examiners like Charles Norris, the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, were among the loudest voices condemning the program, calling it “our national experiment in extermination.”
Because yes, at this point, it did look a lot like the government had simply decided that certain Americans—particularly those from working-class and immigrant communities—were expendable. After all, wealthy people could afford smuggled high-quality alcohol, while the poor were stuck with cheap, denatured booze.
Even when it became clear that the strategy was failing spectacularly and not discouraging drinking, the government kept it up. Congress debated the ethics of poisoning citizens, but Prohibitionist hardliners insisted that if people died from illegal drinking, they had only themselves to blame.
That’s right—rather than admitting that banning alcohol was a mistake, they doubled down and essentially said, “Well, if they’re drinking, they deserve to die.”
The Final Toll
By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the poisoned alcohol program had been responsible for an estimated 10,000 deaths, with many more suffering permanent damage. And yet, Prohibition was widely considered a failure. People drank just as much, if not more, and organized crime flourished. The government’s attempt to control morality had instead led to a mass poisoning campaign.
By the end of the decade, officials in the federal government adapted their strategies for enforcing Prohibition. In 1929, enforcement of Prohibition transferred from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department, which then launched massive crackdowns on organized crime in cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
It was not until the repeal of the 18th amendment in 1933, however, that the federal government reversed course on its temperance policies. By then, Americans had been poisoned with intentionally contaminated liquor.
Lessons Learned? Maybe.
The lesson here? Governments tend to underestimate human stubbornness—especially when it comes to alcohol. If people are willing to drink literal bathtub gin (sometimes made in bathtubs), they’re probably not going to stop just because the liquor supply has a higher-than-average chance of blinding them.
To this day, the Prohibition poisoning scandal stands as one of the more horrifyingly absurd moments in U.S. history—a stark reminder that just because an idea is government-approved doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly, dangerously stupid.
Sources:
Library of Congress, Prohibition: A Case Study of Progressive Reform
American Journal of Public Health, Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation
Smithsonian, Yes, the US Government Poisoned Alcohol in the 1920s
Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Penguin Press, 2010.
Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner, 2010.
New York Times archives on Charles Norris and the Prohibition-era poisoning scandals.
Smithsonian Magazine, "The Chemist Who Uncovered the Secret Mass Poisoning of Prohibition," March 2017.