Drink Up! Very Carefully

Here's an interesting article on Slate about how, during Prohibition, industrial alcohol (frequently stolen, redistilled, and sold for consumption) was intentionally made lethally poisonous by government regulation in order to discourage people from drinking.

And how well did that work out?

"[B]y the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people."

That's some effective federal poisoning. Nicely done! We like a government program that gets results, right?

Oh, wait. The goal was to discourage drinking of alcohol, not specifically to kill people.

Well, the article doesn't investigate whether or not there are estimates of how many people were discouraged from drinking, but someone probably was.

So I guess in the logic of the moment, it all worked out.

Prohibition is a weird thing. I mean, it was against the law to drink alcohol, so people shouldn't have been doing it. Did they deserve whatever they got?

But people really hated that law and felt that it interfered with personal freedoms and their right to do what they wanted. Did general dislike mean it was OK to ignore the law, and that people had a legitimate right to be annoyed when the government poisoned the alcohol on purpose?

As far as I'm concerned, you always have to think about the real world. In the real world, it was known that people were drinking, regardless of the law (and regardless of the poison!).

So if you know people are going to drink your poison and die from it, even if you tell them not to, you're basically killing them (even though it's technically their fault, so you can feel OK about yourself).

So yeah, the poisoning was still pretty bad.

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