During prohibition, the government tried things along those lines, as well as basically any poisonous or unpleasant chemical they could get their hands on. Howe

During prohibition, the government tried things along those lines, as well as basically any poisonous or unpleasant chemical they could get their hands on. However, the problem was that anything not sufficiently alcohol-like could be pretty easily distilled out by bootleggers. What was much harder to distill out was large quantities of exceptionally-poisonous methanol. Nowadays, of course, alcohol is cheap and plentiful enough that there's no incentive to re-nature it, and we can get away with much less extreme measures. In many cases, the alcohol won't contain any methanol at all, and may even be drinkable. A good article on the government's arms race against bootlegging: https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o... (also, the author's book "The Poisoner's Handbook")