Prohibition or Poisoning?
Founded in 1893, the Anti-Saloon League led the state prohibition drive between 1906-1913. The Outbreak of World War I led to a Temporary Wartime Prohibition Act being passed to preserve grain supplies for food. In 1917, Congress voted on the resolution for submission of the Prohibition Amendment to the states. The vote reached the necessary two-thirds quota and was ratified on January 29, 1919, before coming into effect the following year. On October 28, 1919, the National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act after its promoter, Andrew J. Volstead, was enacted.
By 1920, prohibition had been enacted in thirty-three states. This led to the large-scale production and sale of bootlegged alcohol in the United States. One of the main players in the bootlegging trade was the notorious gangster Al Capone. The quest for control of the profitable industry led to a series of gang wars and murders during the 1920s.
In 1906 the U.S. Government ordered manufacturers of industrialized alcohol to begin using a denaturing process, which involved adding harmful chemicals to render it undrinkable. Industrialized alcohol was the main source of alcohol used by bootlegging gangs, who would redistil it to make it potable. By the mid-1920s, the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversaw alcohol enforcement, estimated as much as 60 million gallons of industrialized alcohol was stolen annually to supply the bootlegging trade.
To combat the gang’s illegal trade of alcohol, the U.S. Treasury Department introduced new formulas to be used in the denaturing process of industrialized alcohol. The new formulas included adding poisonous substances such as kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid similar to strychnine). Other formulas contained the addition of “gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone”. The U.S. Treasury Department also ordered that industrialized alcohol should contain up to 10% poisonous methyl alcohol.
In 1926, in New York alone, 1200 became ill following drinking poisonous bootlegged alcohol, 400 of whom died. The following year a further 700 people died in New York. Deaths due to alcohol poisoning began rising across the country. By the time the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933 an estimated 10,000 people nationwide had died from drinking alcohol contaminated with deadly chemicals.