Dying for a drink?

During the prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, speakeasies and gin joints were the place to be to get ahold of “evil booze.” How did the government try to control access? They purposely poisoned industrial alcohol that was being repurposed for cocktails.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you with me on this? We all love those
stories that glorify the Roaring twenties when folks whispered a
magic password to get into speakeasies and gin joints for
some illicit partying during Prohibition, But it wasn't all a
roaring good time. Would our government purposely poison the public

(00:20):
to try to stop them from drinking? Guess what? Turns out?
The FEDS ordered industrial alcohol makers to add poison to
what they sold to scare the public to death, maybe
killing as many as fifty thousand and blinding or paralyzing
hundreds of thousands more. I'm Patty Steele dying for a drink. Literally.

(00:43):
Next on the backstory, We're back with the backstory. Okay,
do you know much about Prohibition? When the government outlawed
alcohol for thirteen years starting in nineteen twenty, did you
know the FEDS mandated that industrial alcohol makers add poison

(01:03):
to what they made to keep people from drinking it.
It killed as many as fifty thousand and maimed hundreds
of thousands. We've kind of seen what that world looked
like in movies like The Untouchables and The Great Gatsby,
and also on TV shows like Boardwalk Empire. Prohibition era
gangsters included al Capone, who took in sixty million dollars

(01:26):
a year during those years. But one of the most
amazing and not so well known stories about Prohibition is
how the FEDS tried to control access to alcohol for
folks who just wanted to party. When the government wants
to control us, they have all sorts of crazy ways
to enforce laws, right, but during Prohibition it got way

(01:48):
dark again. Their approach left by some accounts, fifty thousand
dead and possibly hundreds of thousands permanent impacted by conditions
like paralysis and blindness. Now, how the heck did that happen?
Mass poisoning. Yeah, the government didn't just try to talk

(02:11):
people out at drinking, or even just find them or
put them in jail. They actually poisoned the legal industrial
alcohol being made that bootleggers were turning into hooh. Now,
imagine you're desperate for a drink, but there's none to
be had. If you're really desperate, yeah, might even sip
a little bit of rubbing alcohol. Yuck. So the FEDS

(02:32):
decide to mandate that all industrial alcohol had to be
denatured by adding iodine chloroform, even gasoline and kerosene to
make it really nauseating and in some cases deadly. Now,
if you were a bootlegger, you saw a big market
for illegal booze, so you'd hijack trucks transporting the industrial

(02:54):
stuff and try to make it more drinkable taste wise,
by adding all sorts of chemicals to the flavor. And
they did a little boiling to try and remove the
bad stuff, but you simply couldn't remove all the poison.
People still drank it, making gangsters like al Capone impossibly rich.
He was just twenty six years old when he got

(03:15):
started and was soon taking in sixty million bucks a year.
Guess what, that's well over a billion dollars in today's world.
Experts say Prohibition led to the rise of really powerful
organized crime syndicates. They were obviously raking in money like
nobody's business, and that organized crime world never really recovered

(03:37):
economically after the end of Prohibition killed off their cash cow.
He was the Roaring twenties. Everybody wanted to party. Where
did they go? Well, guess what? There were thirty two
thousand speakeasies in New York City alone. By the way,

(03:59):
speakeasies got their name from how quietly you had to
whisper the password to get in, so nearby cops couldn't
hear you and figure out how to get in themselves.
And those speakeasies would also add things to improve the flavor,
like ginger ale, coca cola, sugar, and lemon, which gave

(04:21):
rise to cocktails. Before that, drinkers were just doing straight shots,
I guess, and get this. Before speakeasies, most folks went
to bars and taverns, but most of them didn't allow
women in as customers, just as entertainment. But speakeasies were
looking for as many customers as possible, so women were

(04:41):
totally welcome to come in to party and toss back
a few of those poisonous cocktails. By nineteen twenty three,
the government decided they had to make it even more poisonous,
so they ordered the folks that made the industrial stuff
to add four percent and wood alcohol, which is incredibly

(05:03):
poisonous to humans, even in really tiny amounts, but they
didn't mandate any warning labels. Again, people drank it, and
anywhere from ten thousand on up to fifty thousand or
more were killed because of it. In addition with hundreds
of thousands becoming blind or paralyzed. On fairness, not everybody

(05:23):
thought it was a good idea to poison alcohol. One
senator called it legalized murder, but a supporter from the
Anti Saloon League said legal alcohol had killed a lot
more people than the government's new program, and that quote
air quotes here, the FEDS were under no obligation to
supply people with safe alcohol when it had been banned.

(05:44):
He went on to say, the person who drinks this
industrial alcohol is deliberately committing suicide. And the government's lee
guy in the prohibition effort, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,
Seemore Lowman, said publicly that the fringes of society that
drink we're dying off fast from poison hooch, and that

(06:04):
if the result is a sober America, a good job
has been done. Really wow, allowing maybe tens of thousands
of people to die and possibly hundreds of thousands to
be permanently disabled by poisoning our vices e yikes, And
we think the present day government is rough on us.

(06:34):
I'm Patty Steele. The backstory is a production of iHeartMedia
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplified Media. We're out
with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for listening to
the backstory, the pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know.