Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we are returning to you with a classic episode.
Uh.
Look, Nolan and I did use to party. Uh we don't party as much anymore, but we are we do.
We like our booze non poisoned. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Tell us about this one.
Oh man, I remember that time that the government, the federal government tried to poison people to keep them from drinking alcohol.
That was a good one, man. How that work out?
We'll see in this classic episode.
Let's roll it.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show everyone, I'm Ben Nol. Have you ever seen a moonshine still kind of.
Looks like a glorified sort of fancy teakettle kind of right.
Yeah, it depends really on the parts that the bootleggers or moonshiners are working with. They're pretty common. It's got a curly cue part for distillation. They were more common during the area of prohibition, but you can still see a lot of old ones out in the mountains now. They would use any available part to make us still. For instance, car carburetors were used in moonshine distillation operations, often to the detriment of the people who ultimately drank the shine.
I wonder where that is. Yeah, what I'm.
Saying here is that due to prohibition, a lot of quality control just took a dive.
Wait a minute, So you're saying that totally ban and outlawing a substance doesn't just make people automatically magically stop wanting to consume said substance.
I know it sounds like a broad brush, right, but history has shown prohibition largely aside from any you know, moral arguments, prohibition of a substance just doesn't work.
Speak of history, we.
Have to give a shout out to one of our favorite parts of the show, super producer Casey pegram Casey.
Bootleg pegram Casey is history personified.
Yes, yeah to someone what you just said, though, Ben, the heart wants what the heart wants.
Sure, sure, and Uncle Sam can't stop the heart from wanting. Right.
Well, governments have very very little luck suppressing a chemical substance of any sort, and alcohol is no different. Today's story takes us to the world of prohibition, and I think everybody across the planet and it is aware in some vague way of the US's experiment with the Eighteenth Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol. Right, people are vaguely aware of that.
I think they're vaguely aware of it. But let's make them intimately aware of it, shall we?
Ben sure? Sure?
So the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in nineteen nineteen, said the following the manufacturer, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, within the importation thereof into or the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory
subject to this jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes. So it prohibits all of that, and it goes into effect on January seventeenth, nineteen twenty, and people thought the people who thought this was a good idea were like, there's a brand new America on the way.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no question that it was kind of a puritanical way of looking at things, And it was sort of this slightly misguided notion that getting rid of the devil's juice was going to all of a sudden make everyone into good people.
Getting rid of Lucifer's sippons would make people inherently better and prevent the dissolution of the nation's moral character and they would paint pictures of rampant crime, juke joints. I don't know if they use the phrase juke joints at that point, and alcoholism. They said, we will increase the success of our economy, we will raise the moral character of the nation, and will make the innocent people of the country safe again.
Because we were also just getting out of a war, and there was a sense that society may well be on the brink of utter chaos. So you know, let's let's get rid of people's thing that kind of makes them feel better, right, right, So I'm not trying to advocate for using alcoholic to numb yourself against the pains of the world, but man, the world was full of some pain around this time.
Things were pretty rough.
A lot of poverty and a lot of divide between classes, and the topic of today's story specifically affects the lower classes almost exclusively.
Yeah, this is a story of victimization and socioeconomic divides. It's also a story wherein Uncle Sam is probably the bad guy, the closest thing we have and to an antagonist.
Right, uncle Sam is such a jerk.
So here we are in prohibition. We found this excellent article on Vox. I don't know if we should do the title yet because it might be a little bit of a spoiler by German Lopez. So in this article, Deborah Bloom, the author of the Poisoner's Handbook, Murdering the Birth of forensic Medicine and jazz Age New York, explains how even before Prohibition, the government had some particular requirements for industrial alcohol manufacturers.
Yeah, this is pretty cool.
It was actually a regulation that required these additives to make this industrial alcohol unpotable, but it also separated them from the potable alcohols, which were taxed differently. So I think originally it was just an additive called methanol, which is a wood alcohol that is, you know, in certain doses toxic when consumed by humans.
Sure, yeah, absolutely, And we see I think you did a great job outlining this. We see a couple of concurrent motivations for this. Right, let's make sure that we still get paid and we can separate the different types of alcohol. But as prohibition was enacted and continued, First off, the people who argued in favor for prohibition were completely wrong. At least in this case, the economy was not helped in any shape fashion.
Or form.
I'm sure law enforcement received some more money as they were trying this impossible war on drugs mission, but the moral character didn't exactly improve either because people kept drinking.
Well, not only did it not improve, it just kind of fed the monster that is organized crime and all of these underground distilleries and speakeasies and.
Just pure outright thievery.
Because that industrial alcohol we were talking about, that was the stuff he needed to make the bootleg booze. So you know, people were actively pulling off heists to get this stuff. And here's the thing that's so cool, Ben, this is something I didn't know. They call this this topic of today's episode, the chemists wore, and it's for good reason. It's because the methanol that was in that industrial alcohol could actually be slightly removed or it could be.
Like redistilled, mitigating, mitigated.
And so that's what the chemists that the bootleggers or the gangsters hired we're doing. And obviously they would pay their chemist way better than the government chemist, so they might attract better talent.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And we know there was this huge industry of illegal alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale.
It booms very.
Very quickly after prohibition, and what we find is kind of this proto breaking bad situation. This really is a chemist war. In an essay written in the twenties called Our Essay in Extermination by a doctor named Charles Norris, who was a Chief Medical Examiner of New York City at the time, he details the size of this trade.
He says the federal government admits that while eighty million gallons of grain alcohol are manufactured yearly under permit, only about seventy million gallons of it turn up again in
legally manufactured products. That means ten million gallons estimated per year are being taken by these groups of gangsters, handed to their like evil wizard chemists, and they're cleaning it out or making it less lethal hopefully, and then they're selling it, you know, in the back rooms as speakeasies across the nation.
Yeah, and that's the thing too, Like, if you were just an average workaday Joe trying to get your boose fix on going one of these speakeasies, you didn't know where it was coming from.
Yeah, you didn't know what.
The It's like buying illegal street drugs today, Like, you know, you have no idea what additives or impurities are in it. You are trusting in your supplier to not kill you.
Right, And even before.
The craziness let's loose that we're about to get into, people were dying from alcohol poisoning because sometimes those chemists didn't do a good enough job of getting this stuff out of there, and it was always impure even if they did do a decent job.
Absolutely, absolutely, And when we say the effected people's health, we're talking about very dark stuff. People died, people encountered paralysis. You know that old trope about drinking moonshine and going blind. Some people did go blind. Yeah, not a whole ton, but we have some spooky numbers for you.
Yeah, it's crazy that I found this article or some blog post about something called ginger jake.
Ginger Jake was a medicine.
It was actually got around prohibition because it was sold as a medicine and it had something in it called tricrestal phosphate that actually helped kind of trick the government's tests into, you know, seeing it as being a pure alcohol or you know, having no medicinal value whatsoever. But
essentially it was just ginger flavored alcohol. But apparently this additive they used, unbeknownst to the company, I imagine, was a very very slow acting neurotoxin, so it took time for it to take hold, and then eventually it actually started to cause all kinds of leg muscular pains and weakness,
and it caused a type of paralysis. According to this uh, this post would actually have a very distinctive walk associated it with it where people would have to like lift their legs up entirely, sort of like the Ministry of Silly Walks from the Monty Python Show, you know, the Jakewalk, the Jake Walk exactly, and we actually have a song.
The interesting thing about this is it was apparently baffling to doctors and toxicologists in the US, but it was actually a couple of blues singers who identified the source of this in two different songs, one by Isham Bracy called Jake Liquor Blues.
Hear a little clip of that.
Money.
And then we also have Tommy Johnson who kind of figured out the source of this condition in his Tongue Alcohol and Jake Blues.
When do a clip of that? Yes, please nog ho.
Y do no.
Fill? Let me that b Martin no home look you man, let it one man, Oh, don't kid.
No. So they're part They're not neurologists, obviously, but they are part of the community where the people encounter this stuff on a regular basis.
That's right, Because you know, the rich, the swells, the high society types, who weren't these kind of Bible thumping prohibition pushers, they were able to get imported booze from places like Europe or the Caribbean. You can get rum, very expensive. You had to know people, but it could be done. But the lower class had to rely on this super cheap, dangerous street bootleg stuff.
Right.
Absolutely. People would also buy things that were counterfeit spirits. They were advertised perhaps as whiskey or they were advertised as vodka, but instead.
They were.
You know, they were tarted up industrial alcol products, and they contained a lot of terrible stuff, not just the neurotoxins, which this was a really interesting story about Jake. I think they didn't figure out the neurological damage it's capable of until what the seventies.
Yeah, and I think it was even worse than they originally had even thought. Turns out that it actually damaged the movement control neurons in the brain or the upper motor neurons.
And thankfully, you know, this is about.
Fifty years later, but they had of course tracked down all of the offending stuff and it was outlawed and gone. But this is interesting because this is a company that's doing this. This is a company that's trying to make a buck by cheating the system during prohibition.
Right, right, And they're not the only one. This also affects pharmacies. They were allowed to dispense whiskey with a prescription, So who runs the prescription pad? Right?
Interesting?
Yeah, And religious authorities that require or i should say institute religious institutions that required alcohol or ceremonies also came under the control of criminal organizations. And it was it's similar to how when marijuana was legalized or decriminalized medically first in California, a lot of people developed nebulous medical conditions. Yeah, so they could get their prescriptions.
A hard time sleeping. Are you got you know, restless leg syndrome or something?
And there were a lot more people claiming to be adherents of certain churches or religious organizations.
People found Jesus, are you saying al Capone was running communion line.
My man people like him were involved for sure, and this this was helpful because these were sources of alcohol that was less likely to be contaminated. But while this was happening, the government realized that all the predictions they had made were wrong. Turned out alcoholism and health problems do true. Alcohol consumption were not going down, they were going up, right, Like alcohol declined a little bit, but a ton of restaurants closed because, as you know, many
restaurants make their largest amount of profit off of spirit sales. Sure, and then the markup right right because of the markup, and then the government figured out that there was a massive leak they could not plug somewhere along the production line of industrial alcohol manufacture and legal use, Like millions of gallons were disappearing, and so they made a pretty brutal, ruthless decision.
It really did ben So earlier we alluded to the chemists War during Prohibition, and I would argue that's something that was kind of ongoing even before this brutal move we're about to talk about. But it really kicked in the high gear when the US government decided to require these industries manufacturers of this industrial alcohol to start adding all kinds of horrible stuff to their product, and I guess, to the government's credit, that's not really the right way
to put it at all. But they were transparent about it. They wanted people to know. It was in the papers. In fact, in the Vox article, the headline from a clipping reads government to double alcohol poison content and also add benzene smell warns drinkers, So they knew.
What people are doing. Yeah, they wanted them.
To know, we're gonna make this stuff even more poison than it already is. And the assumption there was that people were going to look out have some sort of self preservation instinct, not the case. People already were showing that they lacked that entirely when they were drinking this stuff off the streets that was already very, very dangerous and adulterated.
Yeah, this was in nineteen twenty six, and as you say, Noel, to their credit, they were very public about this. But the reason we call this a brutal, ruthless thing is that it was clearly an indefensible, illogical statement. It was both trying to punish people for a moral decision and then also remove any perceived culpability from the inevitable consequences of this terrible decision. Yeah, they put benzene in there. They also put mercury in there, I.
Think a Canda Strych nine, I believe.
But the biggest one was that they doubled that methanol that was in there. And the reason that that one was the doozy is because it was so similar to the alcohol itself atomically that it bonded with it in a way that was very difficult for the chemists to fully get rid of it by redistilling it or whatever. I'm not an alcohol chemist, but whatever they went there to do, it was hard.
Yeah, because it was so closely intertwined with the drinking alcohol. Right. And Charles Norris, who we mentioned earlier in that essay, he and Alexander Gettler, who was the chief toxicologist of New York at the time, they both told the government not to do it. The government did it, and instantly people started dying. It was called this was called the alcohol of the Country by Bloom because it was very
easily accessible stuff. We have a lot of information about this in New York City especially, but we know that at this time bootleggers had nationwide transit infrastructure. So this stuff was going everywhere. And the estimates for the deaths are a little bit fuzzy because some of the deaths were were just the result of alcoholism. But the problem is that at the time alcoholism like drinking oneself to death from regular old alcohol that was listed as a
natural death in obituaries. This was something very different. This was death by poison.
Yeah, and this got Charles Norris, who you read from his essay earlier, who was the chief medical Examiner in New York City, was just wholesale against this. He's like, this is a really bad idea. Government, please don't do this. And of course they didn't listen to him, and so he referred to this and actually ties in with the title of that essay, he referred to this as quote our national experiment in extermination. So it really is almost like this idea of like they call them souses, you know,
the drunks or whatever. It's almost like the government actively wanted to kill them.
And in this.
Slate article, it describes an event that happened on Christmas Eve of nineteen twenty six when a man goes into Bellevue Hospital in New York and is terrified that Santa Claus is coming after him to kill him with a baseball bat. As it turns out, he was in fact experiencing hallucination as a result of this poisonous stuff.
And again, you know the government knew, I mean, I don't know.
It just seems like so ill informed, Like obviously prohibition wasn't working.
They knew prohibition wasn't working.
They wanted up the anty by doing this, But did they really think this.
Was going to stop people? They had to know people were going to drink it.
The approach they appear to have taken here, or rather the stance would be that you have to break a few drunk eggs to make a sober omelet, or the dangerous argument we've talked about before, the belief and the greater good. But yeah, almost one hundred people died, as you said, in December nineteen twenty six, the week of Christmas, due to this, the same year that the government passed these regulations, and hundreds would die in the following years.
This had intentionally been rendered fatal, and Calvin Coolidge was the president at the time, and under his administration these deaths were not seen as a problem. It was kind of like shrug, things happen, but overall it is getting drunks off the streets.
Well, it's sort of like the is it the president of the Philippines who basically advocates for murdering drug dealers in the streets?
Similar vibe, only a little more roundabout way of doing it.
I mean, at least de Terte says what he means and isn't trying to hide behind some kind of puritanical curtain like these guys.
You know, it's very, very troubling.
Norris is walking a thin line on this prohibition issue at the time, you know, because he is the chief Medical Examiner, so he has street cred and he's I think in a little bit of a safer place to argue against prohibition. And he says that something must be added to grain alcohol to prevent it being all drunk away and thereby deny it to legitimate industry and business. So he says, Okay, we have to add some kind of contaminate, but methanol. Seriously, that's going to kill people.
He didn't really propose a different additive, or I couldn't find a different additive that he proposed. But he also he also mentioned something that was really powerful and pressing
it for his time. He revealed how the New York administration of the twenties looked at certain populations as disposable alcoholics, certain types of immigrants, the poor, as we mentioned at the top of this episode, and there were a couple of different rules, like two sets of rules, one for the wealthy people who are drinking a lot and one
for the quote unquote degenerates. And Norris points out that private physicians will rarely expose their deceased customers to the indignity of a post mortem examination, and then they'll just call those deaths those alcohol related deaths deaths by some sort of natural cause. They still look upright and respectable even in the afterlife.
Yeah, Ben, and I think there's this quote from the Chicago Tribune that was cited in the Slay article. It really sums up this whole problem that we're trying to kind of wrap our heads around for nineteen twenty seven. It says, quote, normally, no American government would engage in such business as poisoning its own citizens. It is only in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous,
are considered justified. So, I mean, I think that really sums up the mindset of like this whole era some moral crusade, a total moral crusade that did eventually come to an end.
Yes, luckily, luckily for everyone involved. Teetotalers and boos enthusiasts. A like, prohibition of alcohol was repealed in nineteen thirty three, so it didn't last that long, just a span of about thirteen ridiculous years now were there were there plus to alcohol prohibition. Sure, for certain parties, it was great for organized crime, right, Yeah, it was great for law enforcement,
that's job security because it's an unending war. But for the majority of the country, it was demonstrably a bad thing.
Yeah, sure sounds like it to me. But I don't really see too much of a silver lining here.
So, and it's interesting the way we're seeing this kind of repeat with marijuana prohibition and the way the tide is turning with that. It's really interesting to kind of be quite a time to be alive just to see these things kind of change and see the kind of puritanical attitudes kind of making their way out of fashion.
Yeah, which is strange because in the current situation regarding marijuana, especially in the US. There's some states where it's completely legal, and there are some states where it's still a very serious offense to what possess it carried around grow it. And one of the huge factors in the turning tide regarding marijuana legislation has honestly been not so much the science behind the substance itself, but the economic benefit to governments and businesses of making it legal.
Oh for sure, I mean that's certainly.
You see dollar signs in some of these formerly teetotalin officials, right and yeah, And you would think that with all this concern about the economy with this original prohibition, that would have been a little bit more on people's minds instead of just funneling all that money into the.
Abyss that is the black market, you know.
Right, right. And after prohibition on alcohol ended on the federal level in December fifth of thirty three, some states decided to stay dry states for up to a third of a century longer.
Well, we still have dry counties in the US.
I know Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is a there's really beautiful mountain cabins you can rent there.
That is a dry county. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and it's interesting too.
I want to point out there's something that I noticed as a correction in one of these articles. I think it was in the Slate article. They mischaracterized the eighteenth Amendment as prohibiting the consumption of.
Alcohol that was not illegal.
Yeah, it was just the manufacturer, manufacturing, and distribution, right, import exports.
It's an interesting distinction there.
Yeah, yeah, right, it's kind of like the pursuit of happiness.
That's right, you can go after it. Yeah.
Currently, as we record here in the US, there are still hundreds of dry counties across the country. About ten percent of the country is still what would be considered dry, and about eighteen million people or so live live in that area.
Nobody knows how dry I am, Ben, No one.
Knows the dryness you've seen.
Isn't it weird that the always see drunk people singing that song? I know I'm talking about like in cartoons.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody nobody.
Right, don't story yourself, sir, Lari.
And on that note, feel free to send us your favorite drunken single longs if you find them online. We want to thank you so much for taking this strange journey with us. If you would like to learn more, we can recommend reading Charles Norris's essay and Extermination in full. Deborah Blooms Poisonous Handbook is a great thing, and it's not just about prohibition. Sure, if you liked our arsenic episode, you'll also love Poisoner's Handbook absolutely.
And we would of course like to thank our super producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, our research associate Christopher Hasiotis, who hiped us to today's topic.
And I want to thank you right well, you Ben, I'm looking at you.
Oh, and thank you Noel.
See you next time.
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