Sometimes facts can be strange or sound conspirational but if well documented and recorded are true for history purposes.
Yeah it is True !!
“The US government once poisoned alcohol to get people to stop drinking,” a Facebook post that has been shared nearly 500 times reads. The federal government has been known to go to unethical lengths to discourage alcohol consumption. While the government never intentionally tainted drinking alcohol, it did take steps to ensure that toxic chemicals were present in industrial alcohols.
During the Prohibition era, such chemicals were commonly converted into drinking alcohol, a fact that officials were aware of when they approved the practice.
Enforcing Prohibition
During the Prohibition era, the United States prohibited the production and sale of alcoholic beverages for more than a decade. Since at least the 1830s, there has been a temperance movement in the United States, culminating in the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1920.
The federal government expended significant resources to combat alcohol bootlegging, which had become a lucrative illegal business for crime syndicates such as the Mafia.
While increasing seller pressure and illegal alcohol importation limited the supply of beverages, demand remained strong, with speakeasies and smuggling networks springing up as quickly as they were squashed.
In addition, law enforcement and regulators devised a new strategy for limiting alcohol supply at its source. During the Prohibition era, the majority of bootleg alcohol was made from distilled industrial alcohols. Officials reasoned that by requiring toxic additives in products that would be converted into bootleg alcohol, the supply could be effectively reduced before consumption.
Because of the high demand for alcohol, combined with an unregulated black market, sales of now-toxic bootleg liquors continued despite the additive poisons.
“On New Year’s Day 1927, 41 people died from alcohol poisonings at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. They were frequently drinking industrial drinks.
methanol, also known as wood alcohol, was legal but extremely hazardous poison.”
“As early as 1906, the federal government required companies to denature industrial alcohol to render it unfit for human consumption, but during Prohibition, this was not required.
As an additional deterrent, he directed that quinine, methyl alcohol, and other toxic chemicals be added “According to a History.com article about the time period.
By the end of the decade, federal officials had modified their strategies for enforcing Prohibition. Prohibition enforcement was transferred from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department in 1929, which then launched massive crackdowns on organized crime in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
However, it was not until the repeal of the 18th amendment in 1933 that the federal government reversed its temperance policies. By Americans had been poisoned with purposefully contaminated liquor at the time.
It is true that the federal government during the Prohibition Era mandated that industrial alcohols receive toxic additives, effectively poisoning future supplies of bootleg liquor.
