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How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition (2010)

108 points by calcsam 12y ago

sentientmachine 12y ago
Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. Maybe they put some new chemical nobody heard of into it. Anyway, people are drinking it and getting sick and dying from it left and right. The motor oil is normally for cars, but the increased sales as a recreational drink is boosting sales. You try to prohibit people from drinking motor oil, but they do it anyway. So you go to the motor oil factory and make the motor oil significantly more poisonous. People have been dying from this normally, but now faster than ever because the motor oil makes you gag and puke, but they force it down anyway because YOLO. I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous. Addiction increases cognitive dissonance, making people adhere to incomplete and inaccurate models in order to justify making a villian where none exists and making a victim where none exists.
- pstuart 12y ago
  That's lame analogy. Alcohol can kill when consumed to excess, but you find no fault in killing people because they consume a drug that you disapprove of?
  - Natsu 12y ago
    Alcohol is still denatured, you know. I think they just made it taste bad instead of making it poisonous. The intent was not for people to drink it but for people to avoid diversion (using industrial alcohol as drinking alcohol).
    - mnw21cam 12y ago
      No, it's still poisonous, because it contains the head of distillation, which contains methanol which would be discarded in alcohol made for human consumption. Yes, they add other denaturants to make it taste foul as well. However there are still a few cases of serious alcoholics who try to drink methylated spirit. Amusingly, the treatment for methanol poisoning is to get the patient drunk with the good stuff, although this is usually done under medically-induced coma with a purified ethanol drip. The ethanol competes with the methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme, reducing the rate at which methanol is broken down in the body into really poisonous formic acid. There was a case in 2007 where a hospital ran out of medical ethanol, and substituted vodka in a drip while treating poisoning with ethylene glycol, which has the same treatment. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm
      - tekromancr 12y ago
        There was a really cool speaker at HopeX that talked about it. I can't find the link to the video right now.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    I don't disapprove of drinking poison. Its the people drinking poison who are disapproving of the decision to make poison poisonous. The phenomenon to explain is why the blame is quickly shifted from people drinking poison and getting hurt, to intelligent people who allowed it to continue. Its part of the "shift blame onto the non idiots" agenda in america. Someone get hurt by being stupid? Then find the nearest responsible person and make him pay up to remedy everything. I've got a better idea. How about we laugh at the idiots being idiots and try to encourage the poisoners to at least ratchet up their poisoning poison more slowly. As to make the dying idiots once again the responsible party by choosing to get hurt by drinking poison.
    - pstuart 12y ago
      Per the article, the people drinking it were more often than not poor (as the rich could afford "the good stuff"). But they weren't purchasing denatured alcohol knowingly, they were buying booze from people who were selling them "alcohol". Your compassion is awe inspiring. Edit: your username is very appropriate.
      - sentientmachine 12y ago
        My compassion is earned by the victim at hand, not given away by individuals who like to appropriate other men's resources such as yourself.
        nitrogen 12y ago
        Where did pstuart say anything about "appropriat[ing] other[s'] resources"? What really motivates your obvious visceral disdain for alcohol?
        sentientmachine 12y ago
        The fact that its addictive and damages people. That should be the illegal thing: using a factory to make things that people get addicted to and it harms them. People 1000 years from now are going to look at us in the way we look at witch trials. Likt wtf bro? Why don't you go making bombs that get set off on a hair trigger and just lay them around? They only hurt once in a while if you get them close to your face. Wtf really? Well you see, it was addictive! And... We really liked it! mmm hmmm. I can think of better defenses for the witch trials.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  So do you want to spray cannabis with poison? How about genetically engineering cannabis so that consuming it causes a pink polka dotted tumor to grow on your forehead to facilitate easy identification of cannabis users? Poisoning people is a perversion of science.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    It should be legalized and then if you take it, it goes on your record, so next time you try to get a job the hiring company can decide based upon the reputation of potheads, whether or not to hire you.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - angersock 12y ago
      Why the fuck is it any of their business what I do in my free time?
      - sentientmachine 12y ago
        Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now. Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.
        schrodinger 12y ago
        How exactly does smoking marijuana send you to the emergency room? Oh it must be one of those super common overdoses we hear about.
- mikeash 12y ago
  "I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous." Please tell me you're being sarcastic here. Because otherwise I have no idea how to begin a coherent reply. It's as if I'm suddenly confronted with someone adamantly arguing that the sun is pink, or that cars grow on trees.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    You know an argument is good when the opposing party resorts to ad hominem. First you must explain where I have made a mistake, you pea brain.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      The person adding poison with the intent of killing people is responsible for the people he kills.
    - schrodinger 12y ago
      I don't think that's what ad hominem means.
      - sentientmachine 12y ago
        Cross between ad hominum and straw man. He compared my argument to cars growing on trees the said ha! Look how silly you are. Cars don't grow on trees! Hmmm you don't say. Can we get back to the argument now?
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      >ad hominem I think the term you are looking for is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule
- gregrata 12y ago
  While I get what you are saying.... this was done knowing what the results were going to be - done specifically to get the results (dangerously poisoning people who's behaviour was determined to not be moral) So yeah - I do believe the guilty party are those that knowly made something that was going to poison and kill people. On the "alcohol" is poison argument (WTF?) Fine - it turned from a known poison with known, acceptable results to something that that wasn't known and killed people.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected. I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want. 1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises. 2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer
- wdewind 12y ago
  Except that in the vast majority of people alcohol is a health benefit. Drinkers live longer than non drinkers.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    Health benefit? I'll be sure to tell the kids who's mothers drank during pregnancy that their obvious and life crippling birth defects that nugget of truthiness. Tell me again how much alcohol stimulates GDP and promotes health in our emergency rooms? To the tune of negative 120 billion annually and overloaded emergency rooms treating throngs of out of work alcoholics needing treatment for alcohol related problems? Health benefits. Yeah right. Sure you get a dollar, but you lose 1000. Look at the big picture.
    - wdewind 12y ago
      http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/NEDS&NIS-DRM9/NEDS&NIS-DRM9.pdf http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/NEDS&NIS-DRM9/NEDS&NI... This says it's about a 10th of the cost of what you said. While I regardless agree with you that alcoholism is a problem, your solutions are not only draconian, they are demonstrably ineffective. We've tried them before. They don't work. This isn't about morality, it's about what works.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Please stop spreading this myth. The group of people who don't drink includes a bunch of very ill people, so it's not surprising to find that group dies sooner than the other group. That doesn't mean that alcohol has any health benefit.
    - wdewind 12y ago
      Every doctor I've ever had has recommended that I have 2 drinks a day. "Heart healthy and liver neutral." Is that BS? Totally willing to hear that it is, especially if you have a source.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. The logical approach in this case would be the make the firm halt their motor-oil enhancing activity, not to let them keep doing it and adding your own poison. This is a silly analogy.
- _greim_ 12y ago
  Suppose you're driving a car and have a crash, and the car detects that you weren't wearing a seat belt. Instead of deploying the air bag, swords and knives shoot out of the dashboard and seat. You were breaking the law, so the car manufacturer and the government can't be blamed. Never mind that the entire point of the law was to protect you, you were breaking the damn law.
  - sentientmachine 12y ago
    An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage. Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.
gus_massa 12y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964731 (147 points, 589 days ago, 97 comments)
kungfooey 12y ago
If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Last Call: Rise and Fall of the Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent. There is a PBS documentary as well, but I found it difficult to watch (narration with lots of panning over still photos). The prohibition is a really great example of the unintended consequences of (mostly well-intentioned) morality-by-legislation.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  You mean the Ken Burns' documentary? Panning over still photos is sort of his thing. iPhoto even has a slideshow mode called, appropriately enough, "Ken Burns". Prohibition is excellent, by the way, I recommend you give it another chance.
- idlewords 12y ago
  That book is fantastic. I came here to recommend it.
JasonCEC 12y ago
I debated this ~4 years ago on the Penn State University Parliamentary Debate team. During the practice session I tried to use this as an argument against the claimed moral high ground of the prohibitionists. It failed; our coach and the rest of the team we're able to prove to me, with a more careful reading of the article (and checks from other primary source material) that there was never a "Federal Poisoning Program" and that most of the deaths resulted from a lack of communication with those looking to drink while alcohol was illegal. On both of those points: - 1) Only industrial alcohol was legal to produce during prohibition. Industrial alcohol contains methanol, a compound that can cause blindness and death. It takes a good amount of skill and refinement to remove all traces of methanol from alcohol to make it ready for human consumption - a step that the legal distillers had no reason at the time to take (and would have in fact had them closed down for bootlegging) - 2) The Federal Government never added poison (methanol) to alcohol made by bootleggers - had they found the bootleggers, they would have destroyed their stills and jailed them, not poisoned their stock, brought it to market, and sold it. I believe[citation needed] only about 10% of the alcohol produced by the bootleggers was contaminated in any way, and even less caused 'permanent damage' beyond what you would expect from people drinking alcohol. - 3) The order to add methanol to industrial alcohol is historically dubious... All of the citations I can find for it in the searchable web (read: Google) links back to the original Slate article. Supposedly, the article is based on this Article in Nature[1]. From the abstract, it is more likely that the mass of laws and policies that followed the ratification of the 18 amendment included an understanding that industrial alcohol should be exempt but rendered purposely undrinkable - which it already was. I am personally against prohibition, and against the government attempting to mandate morality; but I fear that this article is popular because of its anti-government attitudes - but you could only come to the conclusion that there was ever a "Federal Poisoning Program" if you give perfect foresight agency to every policy the government passes.... [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a...
- maxerickson 12y ago
  There is a reason that it's called "denatured alcohol". It's because something is added to it to make it unsuitable for consumption. The Volstead Act (establishing prohibition) makes repeated references to "bonded denaturing plants": http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.html http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.h... It also mentions 'Denatured alcohol or denatured rum produced and used as provided by laws and regulations now or hereafter in force.', so I'm sure there is some text somewhere describing the processes. There is often methanol in fermented mash, but if you have a working still, the sophisticated method of getting rid of it is to discard the early fraction of the distillation. It probably isn't a large amount of methanol (but there's probably other assorted things not to drink). Edit: Here's the IRS guidance issued in association with the 1906 law that created "industrial alcohol" by not taxing denatured alcohol: http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=BWkzvxsMii&dq=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B... This page talks about adding methyl alcohol "in the presence and under the direction of an authorized Government officer": http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=BWkzvxsMii&dq=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B... Apparently for use in cars, because it was cheaper than gasoline.
refurb 12y ago
The gov't still poisons alcohol. You can go to your local bardware store and buy denatured alcohol. Since you can't drink, it's not taxed. I think this article is making this into something sinister when it wasn't.
- ossreality 12y ago
  Are you fucking kidding me?
microcolonel 12y ago
“Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.” While I have a somewhat hard time believing the basic premise of this article in general, this statement makes no sense. What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions, and a policy which(granted in this case with dubious proof) causes the exact same deadly-bad decisions?
- malka 12y ago
  > What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions Well, for some people, that is any taxe above 0%.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
danelectro 12y ago
The "Federal Poisoning Program" is still in force currently in 27 CFR 19 - 21 as posted by esbranson. Industrial alcohol can contain numerous optional denaturants other than methanol, here is the latest regulation according to Cornell, showing specific denaturants and their applicable formula Nos.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 Among these are the SD Alcohols (SDA or Specially Denatured Alcohols) seen in shampoos and other cosmetics. Many of these denaturants are intended to be nearly impossible to remove from the product, others not as difficult or costly to separate. The federal government did not need to add poison to alcohol made by bootleggers, it was already present in the hijacked SDAs and CDAs the bootleggers were using as raw material. Depending on sophistication, bootleggers (sometimes) were removing (some of) the denaturant before clandestinely distributing their material for beverage use. EDIT: I have single-handedly tested billions of dollars worth of industrial alcohols, and methanol is one of the big ones around here. Today methanol purity (assay) is performed internationally according to the instrumental technique that I personally developed on my own decades ago and held in confidence for years before it "leaked" from the lab. Purty good at beverage grade too, considering work for a craft distiller presently. Also lived in two counties with borders delineated by rivers such that an island in the river was not in either county, which allowed plausible deniability for local law enforcement during prohibition. One of these islands at one time being owned by Al Capone.
trhway 12y ago
>They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States reminded about "almost Prohibition" of 30 years ago in USSR which resulted in many hard-drinking/alcoholics people extracting alcohol from various industrial and domestic liquids containing it, up to and including shoe polish, and moonshiners producing their product from unimaginable things because of limited availability of various food-grade (or at least looking/smelling like it) sugars/starches and adding things like domestic insecticide for better "kick" (or "torgue" as it is said in Russian) I think looking at the DNA of many Russians today, one can see what was drunk back then by their parents :)
- mnw21cam 12y ago
  Shoe polish? You had shoe polish? Honestly, some people don't know they're born. When I were a lad, we used to make our vodka out of chairs. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=samogon+taburetka http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=samogon+taburetka (With apologies to a Russian friend of mine who said this about turnips.)

108 points by calcsam 12y ago

Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. Maybe they put some new chemical nobody heard of into it. Anyway, people are drinking it and getting sick and dying from it left and right. The motor oil is normally for cars, but the increased sales as a recreational drink is boosting sales. You try to prohibit people from drinking motor oil, but they do it anyway. So you go to the motor oil factory and make the motor oil significantly more poisonous. People have been dying from this normally, but now faster than ever because the motor oil makes you gag and puke, but they force it down anyway because YOLO. I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous. Addiction increases cognitive dissonance, making people adhere to incomplete and inaccurate models in order to justify making a villian where none exists and making a victim where none exists.

pstuart 12y ago
That's lame analogy. Alcohol can kill when consumed to excess, but you find no fault in killing people because they consume a drug that you disapprove of?
- Natsu 12y ago
  Alcohol is still denatured, you know. I think they just made it taste bad instead of making it poisonous. The intent was not for people to drink it but for people to avoid diversion (using industrial alcohol as drinking alcohol).
  - mnw21cam 12y ago
    No, it's still poisonous, because it contains the head of distillation, which contains methanol which would be discarded in alcohol made for human consumption. Yes, they add other denaturants to make it taste foul as well. However there are still a few cases of serious alcoholics who try to drink methylated spirit. Amusingly, the treatment for methanol poisoning is to get the patient drunk with the good stuff, although this is usually done under medically-induced coma with a purified ethanol drip. The ethanol competes with the methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme, reducing the rate at which methanol is broken down in the body into really poisonous formic acid. There was a case in 2007 where a hospital ran out of medical ethanol, and substituted vodka in a drip while treating poisoning with ethylene glycol, which has the same treatment. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm
    - tekromancr 12y ago
      There was a really cool speaker at HopeX that talked about it. I can't find the link to the video right now.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  I don't disapprove of drinking poison. Its the people drinking poison who are disapproving of the decision to make poison poisonous. The phenomenon to explain is why the blame is quickly shifted from people drinking poison and getting hurt, to intelligent people who allowed it to continue. Its part of the "shift blame onto the non idiots" agenda in america. Someone get hurt by being stupid? Then find the nearest responsible person and make him pay up to remedy everything. I've got a better idea. How about we laugh at the idiots being idiots and try to encourage the poisoners to at least ratchet up their poisoning poison more slowly. As to make the dying idiots once again the responsible party by choosing to get hurt by drinking poison.
  - pstuart 12y ago
    Per the article, the people drinking it were more often than not poor (as the rich could afford "the good stuff"). But they weren't purchasing denatured alcohol knowingly, they were buying booze from people who were selling them "alcohol". Your compassion is awe inspiring. Edit: your username is very appropriate.
    - sentientmachine 12y ago
      My compassion is earned by the victim at hand, not given away by individuals who like to appropriate other men's resources such as yourself.
      - nitrogen 12y ago
        Where did pstuart say anything about "appropriat[ing] other[s'] resources"? What really motivates your obvious visceral disdain for alcohol?
        sentientmachine 12y ago
        The fact that its addictive and damages people. That should be the illegal thing: using a factory to make things that people get addicted to and it harms them. People 1000 years from now are going to look at us in the way we look at witch trials. Likt wtf bro? Why don't you go making bombs that get set off on a hair trigger and just lay them around? They only hurt once in a while if you get them close to your face. Wtf really? Well you see, it was addictive! And... We really liked it! mmm hmmm. I can think of better defenses for the witch trials.
fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
So do you want to spray cannabis with poison? How about genetically engineering cannabis so that consuming it causes a pink polka dotted tumor to grow on your forehead to facilitate easy identification of cannabis users? Poisoning people is a perversion of science.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  It should be legalized and then if you take it, it goes on your record, so next time you try to get a job the hiring company can decide based upon the reputation of potheads, whether or not to hire you.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - angersock 12y ago
    Why the fuck is it any of their business what I do in my free time?
    - sentientmachine 12y ago
      Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now. Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.
      - schrodinger 12y ago
        How exactly does smoking marijuana send you to the emergency room? Oh it must be one of those super common overdoses we hear about.
mikeash 12y ago
"I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous." Please tell me you're being sarcastic here. Because otherwise I have no idea how to begin a coherent reply. It's as if I'm suddenly confronted with someone adamantly arguing that the sun is pink, or that cars grow on trees.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  You know an argument is good when the opposing party resorts to ad hominem. First you must explain where I have made a mistake, you pea brain.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The person adding poison with the intent of killing people is responsible for the people he kills.
  - schrodinger 12y ago
    I don't think that's what ad hominem means.
    - sentientmachine 12y ago
      Cross between ad hominum and straw man. He compared my argument to cars growing on trees the said ha! Look how silly you are. Cars don't grow on trees! Hmmm you don't say. Can we get back to the argument now?
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    >ad hominem I think the term you are looking for is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule
gregrata 12y ago
While I get what you are saying.... this was done knowing what the results were going to be - done specifically to get the results (dangerously poisoning people who's behaviour was determined to not be moral) So yeah - I do believe the guilty party are those that knowly made something that was going to poison and kill people. On the "alcohol" is poison argument (WTF?) Fine - it turned from a known poison with known, acceptable results to something that that wasn't known and killed people.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected. I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want. 1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises. 2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer
wdewind 12y ago
Except that in the vast majority of people alcohol is a health benefit. Drinkers live longer than non drinkers.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  Health benefit? I'll be sure to tell the kids who's mothers drank during pregnancy that their obvious and life crippling birth defects that nugget of truthiness. Tell me again how much alcohol stimulates GDP and promotes health in our emergency rooms? To the tune of negative 120 billion annually and overloaded emergency rooms treating throngs of out of work alcoholics needing treatment for alcohol related problems? Health benefits. Yeah right. Sure you get a dollar, but you lose 1000. Look at the big picture.
  - wdewind 12y ago
    http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/NEDS&NIS-DRM9/NEDS&NIS-DRM9.pdf http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/NEDS&NIS-DRM9/NEDS&NI... This says it's about a 10th of the cost of what you said. While I regardless agree with you that alcoholism is a problem, your solutions are not only draconian, they are demonstrably ineffective. We've tried them before. They don't work. This isn't about morality, it's about what works.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Please stop spreading this myth. The group of people who don't drink includes a bunch of very ill people, so it's not surprising to find that group dies sooner than the other group. That doesn't mean that alcohol has any health benefit.
  - wdewind 12y ago
    Every doctor I've ever had has recommended that I have 2 drinks a day. "Heart healthy and liver neutral." Is that BS? Totally willing to hear that it is, especially if you have a source.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. The logical approach in this case would be the make the firm halt their motor-oil enhancing activity, not to let them keep doing it and adding your own poison. This is a silly analogy.
_greim_ 12y ago
Suppose you're driving a car and have a crash, and the car detects that you weren't wearing a seat belt. Instead of deploying the air bag, swords and knives shoot out of the dashboard and seat. You were breaking the law, so the car manufacturer and the government can't be blamed. Never mind that the entire point of the law was to protect you, you were breaking the damn law.
- sentientmachine 12y ago
  An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage. Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.

gus_massa 12y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964731 (147 points, 589 days ago, 97 comments)

kungfooey 12y ago

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Last Call: Rise and Fall of the Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent. There is a PBS documentary as well, but I found it difficult to watch (narration with lots of panning over still photos). The prohibition is a really great example of the unintended consequences of (mostly well-intentioned) morality-by-legislation.

mratzloff 12y ago
You mean the Ken Burns' documentary? Panning over still photos is sort of his thing. iPhoto even has a slideshow mode called, appropriately enough, "Ken Burns". Prohibition is excellent, by the way, I recommend you give it another chance.
idlewords 12y ago
That book is fantastic. I came here to recommend it.

JasonCEC 12y ago

I debated this ~4 years ago on the Penn State University Parliamentary Debate team. During the practice session I tried to use this as an argument against the claimed moral high ground of the prohibitionists. It failed; our coach and the rest of the team we're able to prove to me, with a more careful reading of the article (and checks from other primary source material) that there was never a "Federal Poisoning Program" and that most of the deaths resulted from a lack of communication with those looking to drink while alcohol was illegal. On both of those points: - 1) Only industrial alcohol was legal to produce during prohibition. Industrial alcohol contains methanol, a compound that can cause blindness and death. It takes a good amount of skill and refinement to remove all traces of methanol from alcohol to make it ready for human consumption - a step that the legal distillers had no reason at the time to take (and would have in fact had them closed down for bootlegging) - 2) The Federal Government never added poison (methanol) to alcohol made by bootleggers - had they found the bootleggers, they would have destroyed their stills and jailed them, not poisoned their stock, brought it to market, and sold it. I believe[citation needed] only about 10% of the alcohol produced by the bootleggers was contaminated in any way, and even less caused 'permanent damage' beyond what you would expect from people drinking alcohol. - 3) The order to add methanol to industrial alcohol is historically dubious... All of the citations I can find for it in the searchable web (read: Google) links back to the original Slate article. Supposedly, the article is based on this Article in Nature[1]. From the abstract, it is more likely that the mass of laws and policies that followed the ratification of the 18 amendment included an understanding that industrial alcohol should be exempt but rendered purposely undrinkable - which it already was. I am personally against prohibition, and against the government attempting to mandate morality; but I fear that this article is popular because of its anti-government attitudes - but you could only come to the conclusion that there was ever a "Federal Poisoning Program" if you give perfect foresight agency to every policy the government passes.... [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a...

maxerickson 12y ago
There is a reason that it's called "denatured alcohol". It's because something is added to it to make it unsuitable for consumption. The Volstead Act (establishing prohibition) makes repeated references to "bonded denaturing plants": http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.html http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.h... It also mentions 'Denatured alcohol or denatured rum produced and used as provided by laws and regulations now or hereafter in force.', so I'm sure there is some text somewhere describing the processes. There is often methanol in fermented mash, but if you have a working still, the sophisticated method of getting rid of it is to discard the early fraction of the distillation. It probably isn't a large amount of methanol (but there's probably other assorted things not to drink). Edit: Here's the IRS guidance issued in association with the 1906 law that created "industrial alcohol" by not taxing denatured alcohol: http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=BWkzvxsMii&dq=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B... This page talks about adding methyl alcohol "in the presence and under the direction of an authorized Government officer": http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=BWkzvxsMii&dq=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q=1906%20acts%20of%20congress%20alcohol%20denatured&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B... Apparently for use in cars, because it was cheaper than gasoline.

refurb 12y ago

The gov't still poisons alcohol. You can go to your local bardware store and buy denatured alcohol. Since you can't drink, it's not taxed. I think this article is making this into something sinister when it wasn't.

ossreality 12y ago
Are you fucking kidding me?

microcolonel 12y ago

“Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.” While I have a somewhat hard time believing the basic premise of this article in general, this statement makes no sense. What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions, and a policy which(granted in this case with dubious proof) causes the exact same deadly-bad decisions?

malka 12y ago
> What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions Well, for some people, that is any taxe above 0%.

deleted 12y ago

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danelectro 12y ago

The "Federal Poisoning Program" is still in force currently in 27 CFR 19 - 21 as posted by esbranson. Industrial alcohol can contain numerous optional denaturants other than methanol, here is the latest regulation according to Cornell, showing specific denaturants and their applicable formula Nos.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 Among these are the SD Alcohols (SDA or Specially Denatured Alcohols) seen in shampoos and other cosmetics. Many of these denaturants are intended to be nearly impossible to remove from the product, others not as difficult or costly to separate. The federal government did not need to add poison to alcohol made by bootleggers, it was already present in the hijacked SDAs and CDAs the bootleggers were using as raw material. Depending on sophistication, bootleggers (sometimes) were removing (some of) the denaturant before clandestinely distributing their material for beverage use. EDIT: I have single-handedly tested billions of dollars worth of industrial alcohols, and methanol is one of the big ones around here. Today methanol purity (assay) is performed internationally according to the instrumental technique that I personally developed on my own decades ago and held in confidence for years before it "leaked" from the lab. Purty good at beverage grade too, considering work for a craft distiller presently. Also lived in two counties with borders delineated by rivers such that an island in the river was not in either county, which allowed plausible deniability for local law enforcement during prohibition. One of these islands at one time being owned by Al Capone.

trhway 12y ago

>They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States reminded about "almost Prohibition" of 30 years ago in USSR which resulted in many hard-drinking/alcoholics people extracting alcohol from various industrial and domestic liquids containing it, up to and including shoe polish, and moonshiners producing their product from unimaginable things because of limited availability of various food-grade (or at least looking/smelling like it) sugars/starches and adding things like domestic insecticide for better "kick" (or "torgue" as it is said in Russian) I think looking at the DNA of many Russians today, one can see what was drunk back then by their parents :)

mnw21cam 12y ago
Shoe polish? You had shoe polish? Honestly, some people don't know they're born. When I were a lad, we used to make our vodka out of chairs. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=samogon+taburetka http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=samogon+taburetka (With apologies to a Russian friend of mine who said this about turnips.)