28. Industrial vs Drinking Alcohol
Wherever we go, alcohol is bound to be near us. Even for those who don’t drink and have no beer or wine in their fridges or liquor in their cabinets, alcohol is found as an additive in their fuel tanks, and many household products such as nail polish, disinfectants, hand sanitizers, and perfumes contain alcohol. In 1906, the authorities had mandated that chemicals be added to grain alcohol intended for industrial use, to make it undrinkable. Alcohol thus treated is known as “denatured” alcohol or “wood spirits”. The mandate was met with little resistance from the manufacturers of industrial alcohol.
The addition of chemicals to their stocks to denature them made them exempt from the liquor taxes imposed on drinkable alcohol, so they were more than happy to comply. People determined to remove chemical additives from denatured industrial alcohol could do so if they really wanted to, and some did – a process known as “renaturing”. However, with legal alcohol readily available, and often quite cheap, the incentive to go through the trouble – especially on a large scale – was simply not there. All that changed with the enactment of Prohibition, and the resultant scarcity of regular drinkable booze.