During Prohibition in the 1920s, Americans kept drinking alcohol despite it being illegal. The government tried everything to stop them—raids, arrests, massive crackdowns. Nothing worked. So on Christmas Eve 1926, the U.S. government decided to try a different approach: they deliberately poisoned the alcohol supply.
Here's what happened: Industrial alcohol was still legal because it was used in products like paint, medicine, and cleaning supplies. Bootleggers would steal this industrial alcohol, "wash" it to remove the added chemicals, and sell it as drinkable liquor. The federal government knew this was happening, so they ordered manufacturers to add even deadlier poisons—ones that couldn't be easily removed.
They added methanol (wood alcohol), which causes blindness and death. They added kerosene, gasoline, chloroform, and acetone. One particularly nasty formula included mercury salts and nicotine. The government literally created a poison cocktail and released it into the supply chain, knowing Americans would drink it.
The idea was simple: if people knew the alcohol was poisoned, they'd stop drinking. But people didn't stop. They kept drinking, and they started dying by the thousands. On New Year's Day 1927, just one week after the new poisoning policy began, 31 people died in New York City alone from tainted alcohol.
The medical examiner's office was overwhelmed with bodies. Victims showed up at hospitals blind, convulsing, their organs shutting down. Some died screaming in agony. Others went into comas and never woke up. The government's response? They blamed the victims for breaking the law and continued the poisoning program.
By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, an estimated 10,000 Americans had been killed by their own government's poisoning program. Historians believe the actual number is much higher since many deaths in rural areas were never officially recorded, and doctors often listed cause of death as "alcoholism" rather than "government-sanctioned poisoning."
The craziest part? The government never hid what they were doing. Wayne Wheeler, a major Prohibition advocate, openly defended the policy in newspapers: "The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide."
Even more disturbing: the program specifically targeted poor people. The wealthy could afford imported liquor smuggled from Canada or Europe, which wasn't poisoned. The deadly industrial alcohol ended up in cheap speakeasies in working-class neighborhoods. The government essentially created a system that killed poor Americans while rich ones drank safely.
Think about this: The U.S. government looked at a public health crisis and decided the solution was mass poisoning of its own citizens. They knew people would die—that was the point. They wanted to create enough fear and death to enforce a law that the public clearly didn't support. It's one of the darkest chapters in American history, and most people have never even heard about it.