Forgotten History: Prohibition Somehow Even Worse Than I Had Thought

Unbelievably bad. Blurb:

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.

But then again, as I've said before, whenever (a) government decides to engage in social engineering, and (b) other people are doing things to you "for your own good," the result is always abysmal. I swear, more immoral things are done in the name of morality than not.

Here's a great quote from a Chicago Tribune editorial of 1927:

"It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."

Hmmm. That "curious fanaticism" seems to have plenty of modern cousins.