THE CHEMIST'S WAR

The Little-Told Story of How the U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol
During Prohibition With Deadly Consequences.

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights,
when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room
at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with
fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him,
wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was--the alcohol-induced
hallucination was just a symptom--the man died. So did another
holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the
hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by
alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another
23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of
life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called
gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills
frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this
outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would
shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even
after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different
kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial
alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen
by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare
people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time
Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some
estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition"
remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American
law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents,
Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during
the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in
extermination." 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.

I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new
book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My
first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard
that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I
kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision
in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an
herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but
government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would
deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the
1920s--if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it
upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the
outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident
created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which
reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that
federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.

During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept
the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized
in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such
business. ... It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition
that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others,
however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in
cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their
law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle
Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.

The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned
the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in
the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol
organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing
on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The
Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly
later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.

But people continued to drink--and in large quantities. Alcoholism
rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the
increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened
for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York
City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on
smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's
defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and
naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of
upright behavior.

Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol
from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by
stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol--used in paints and
solvents, fuels and medical supplies--and redistilling it to make it potable.

Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with
some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S.
government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for
manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable
spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing
alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million
gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the
country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's
government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some
70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added
poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting
compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste
so awful that it became undrinkable.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed
chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable
state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the
government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and
redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the
country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their
products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable
poisons--kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to
strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts,
nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid,
quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more
methyl alcohol be added--up to 10 percent of total product. It was
the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body
count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded
with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by
putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles
Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it
continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people
determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to
be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral
responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although
it cannot be held legally responsible."

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in
whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that
is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He
publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his
toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for
poisons--that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from
studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate
effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed
out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened
and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal
in low grade stuff."

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200
were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year,
deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around
the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry
clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the
use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild
beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of
liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition
statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18th
Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself
faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking
about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey
reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition--and the
poisonous measures taken to enforce it--had never quite happened.

* Correction, Feb. 22, 2010: The article originally and incorrectly
said that the 18th Amendment banned the sale and consumption of
alcohol. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of
alcohol, not consumption.