U.S. Govt poisoned its own citizens during Prohibition, 10000 murdered by piratenews

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U.S. Govt poisoned its own citizens during Prohibition, 10000 murdered

POSTED BY: PIRATENEWS
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 10:25
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:12 AM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

Ethanol poisoning causes brain damage

Quote:
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.

In a dark but little-known chapter of U.S. history, the federal government ordered the poisoning of alcohol supplies to deter and punish those who sought to flout Prohibition-era bans.

Starting in 1906, the United States began requiring manufacturers of industrial ethanol to put the chemical through a process to distinguish it from the identical substance found in alcoholic beverages. After the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol was banned by the 18th Amendment and the government cracked down on smuggling operations, bootleggers turned to chemistry to keep their customers supplied. A simple process was used to extract toxic chemicals from the industrial alcohol used in paints, solvents, fuels and medicine, and this relatively clean alcohol was then used to make beverages. By the mid-1920s, an estimated 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were being stolen per year.

In response, the administration of President Calvin Coolidge ordered industry to add higher levels of more difficult-to-remove poisons to their alcohol, including acetone, benzene, cadmium, camphor, carbolic acid, chloroform, ether, formaldehyde, gasoline, iodine, kerosene, methyl alcohol, mercury salts, nicotine, quinine and zinc. Shortly after the institution of this campaign, 31 people were poisoned to death over the course of the Christmas holiday in New York City alone. Historians estimate that a total of 10,000 people were killed by the program before Prohibition ended in 1933.

The poisoning program was no secret, as the government hoped that knowledge of it would deter people from drinking -- although consumption of alcohol was not itself illegal.

"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," said New York City medical examiner Charles Norris. "[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."

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.

http://www.naturalnews.com/029029_Prohibition_poisoning.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188

Quote:
"Strictly speaking, a driver can register a BAC of 0.00% and still be convicted of a DUI. The level of BAC does not clear a driver when it is below the 'presumed level of intoxication.'"
—Tennessee Driver Handbook and Driver License Study Guide, 2010
www.piratenews.org/theprohibitiontimes.html

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:20 AM

DREAMTROVE

They're still doing it. Rubbing alcohol is poisoned intentionally to avoid alcohol regulations, resulting in thousands of deaths.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:28 AM

JONGSSTRAW

"We meant it for the best." I remember those words from somewhere...

Those are always the last words spoken by "enlightened" people seeking to impose their own beliefs and values on the idiot masses, usually as their self-created catastrophe is unfolding.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:39 AM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
They're still doing it. Rubbing alcohol is poisoned intentionally to avoid alcohol regulations, resulting in thousands of deaths.

All part of The Plan on the Georgia Guidestones.

Quote:
In 2007, 7,447 cases of isopropanol ingestions were reported to the US Poison Control Centers. Of these, 36 patients were classified as experiencing "major" morbidity with one patient dying. In the same year, 2,252 cases of methanol and 5,395 cases of ethylene glycol were reported. Of those intoxicated with methanol, 26 patients were classified as experiencing "major" disability, and 11 additional patients died. For those patients who were intoxicated with ethylene glycol, 135 patients were classified as having "major" disability, with an additional 16 patients dying.5 It is important to recognize that these numbers likely underestimate the true incidence of exposure, however, because of both a failure to recognize the ingestion as well as a failure to report the suspected or known ingestion to a poison control center.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/812411-overview

No mention of rubbing alcohol. Ehylene glycol (antifreeze) is added to underarm deordorant and FOODS.

Quote:
In the United States, rubbing alcohol, USP and all preparations coming under the classification of Rubbing Alcohols must be manufactured in accordance with the requirements of the US Treasury Department, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, using Formula 23-H (8 parts by volume of acetone, 1.5 parts by volume of methyl isobutyl ketone, and 100 parts by volume of ethyl alcohol). It contains 97.5-100% by volume of absolute ethyl alcohol, the rest consists of water and the denaturants, with or without color additives, and perfume oils. Rubbing Alcohol contains in each 100 mL not less than 355 mg of sucrose octaacetate or not less than 1.40 mg of denatonium benzoate. roduct labels for rubbing alcohol include a number of warnings about the chemical, including the flammability hazards and its intended use only as a topical antiseptic and not for internal wounds or consumption. It should be used in a well-ventilated area due to inhalation hazards. Poisoning can occur from ingestion, inhalation, or consumption of rubbing alcohol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubbing_alcohol

Quote:
Ask A Scientist: What is the difference between denatured alcohol and rubbing alcohol?

Denatured alcohol is ethanol to which poisonous and foul-tasting chamicals have been added to make it unfit for drinking. There is more than one recipe for denaturing alcohol; some add methanol or isopropanol, some gasoline, and so on.

Rubbing alcohol is an alcohol intended to be rubbed on the skin. Frequently 70% iso-propyl alcohol / 30% water is used; sometimes ethanol with added iso-propyl alcohol is used. You don't want to use denatured alcohol that is made with anything that shouldn't be placed on the skin, such as gasoline!

So, some, but not all, kinds of denatured alcohol can be used as rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol may also not contain any ethanol at all, which would disqualify it from being "denatured". So, some but not all kinds of rubbing alcohol are denatured alcohol, and some but not all kinds of denatured alcohol can be rubbing alcohol.

Richard E. Barrans Jr., Ph.D.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem00/chem00102.htm

KTP

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 5:29 AM

DREAMTROVE

Thanks for the clarification.

I think your right this is a guidestones issue. The law protects the alcohol industry, which in turn helps the control of drinking, since when people drink they do silly things like ha sex, and we can let's that happen to the worker ants or there would be Eloi everywhere.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 6:42 AM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Thanks for the clarification.

I think your right this is a guidestones issue. The law protects the alcohol industry, which in turn helps the control of drinking, since when people drink they do silly things like ha sex, and we can let's that happen to the worker ants or there would be Eloi everywhere.

Alcohol beverages are exempt from food labeling laws... WTF are They putting in there, chems to make it more addictive?

Tobacco is also exempt from labeling laws, and is freebased to make it more addictive, regardless of nicotine content.

Quote:
“A good prosecutor gets a guilty man convicted, but a great prosecutor gets an innocent man convicted.”
-Dallas County district attorney general Henry Wade (Roe v Wade with 50-million Americans genocided so far; Lee "I'm Just A Patsy" Oswald murdered in Dallas Police station by Kosher Nostra mobster Jacob "Jack Ruby" Rubenstein, same police station President JFK Sr was murdered in front of, same police station Jack Ruby died in after winning a new trial date)

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:10 AM

JONGSSTRAW

Quote:
Originally posted by piratenews:

I was 10 years old when Kennedy was shot. I have never believed a single word of the Warren Commission Report. I do strongly believe that it was indeed ex-CIA agents and other disgruntled Intelligence community members who set up Kennedy for the easy kill. Oliver Stone's movie JFK was, in my opinion, very very close to the truth, except for the part about LBJ knowing and approving of the action. I could never believe that of LBJ. JFK and his brother Bobby pissed off a lot of people in a very short time. Firing Alan Dulles as CIA Director, aborting the Bay of Pigs operation by cancelling the air cover, reining in Hoover's FBI to report to AG Bobby were all motivations for the assassination. There was also big money at stake. Viet Nam was looking to be a long-term goldmine for arms and aircraft companies, and they didn't much like Kennedy's waivering on a commitment to war.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:58 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
"We meant it for the best." I remember those words from somewhere...

Those are always the last words spoken by "enlightened" people seeking to impose their own beliefs and values on the idiot masses, usually as their self-created catastrophe is unfolding.

I think you heard them from BP executives, trying to impose their beliefs (in less regulation and more cost-cutting on safety measures) and values (as in, increasing the value of their stock) on those on the Gulf Coast, whom you carelessly seem to refer to as "the idiot masses".

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

On this matter, make no mistake. I want you to go fuck yourself long and hard, as well as anyone who agrees with you. I got no use for you. --Auraptor

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 10:25 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Jongs, actually it was that bastard Cord Meyer, with a lotta help from LBJ and this hardline cabal that hearkens all the way back to the business plot, and the pisser that set them off was Kennedy shitcanning NORTHWOODS and trying to fire Lemnitzer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plot

E Howard Hunt spilled his guts before he capped it, and his son got that shit on tape, paper, and made notes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt#JFK_Conspiracy_allegations
_and_Death

I normally avoid posting vids, but in his own words, here...

Worse was that although they dodge around mentioning it, much later that punk George Bush was the go-to guy for trying to keep the lid on that Frank Church (of the Church Committee) was trying to, and eventually DID, pry off, revealing the tremendous abuses which'd been goin on since Hoover, which means it's damn likely he knew about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

Worst of it is, is you follow the Ratbastards behind this shit, starting with LBJ, through Nixon, Ford, Reagan and then to Bush I&II, it's always the same fuckin names poppin up, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, etc - and after Kennedy got turfed, thanks to LBJ and Scoop Jackson, they had both sides sewn up neat as you please, anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoop_Jackson

In case ya didn't know, it was the Democrats which spawned the NeoCons, mind you, right outta Scoops office, and his files were retroactively classified cause they indicated a certain amount of premeditation to the shit Shrub pulled - as in planned from the very moment he took office.

So in essence, it's the same goons - although they had to grit their teeth for four straight years while some lucky peanut farmer managed to score on the ire of americans tired of being shit on by both sides of the line.

Obamas one of em too, right down the line from Tammany Hall to the Chicago Political Machine and the Kennedy/Clinton line of gladhanders, which is just a different branch of that same tree, and the reason I have disliked him intensely ever since he started eyeballing the oval office.

Although for a fact, I hate the damn NeoCons more.

-Frem

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