As if Americans hadn’t accumulated enough dark suspicions about their government over the past 50-odd years.
In 1926, the federal government poisoned alcohol to curb consumption during Prohibition; by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, an estimated 10,000 people had died from this poisoning.When the manufacture and sale of alcohol was illegal between 1920 and 1933, regulatory agencies encouraged measures making industrial alcohol undrinkable, including the addition of lethal chemicals.
To the question at hand: Did the federal government really add poison to alcohol to discourage people from drinking it?. The government did purposely add poisonous substances to alcohol, and this did result in thousands of deaths during Prohibition. The story of how that came to pass is longer and more nuanced than the Internet meme suggests, however. And it began well before the passage of the 18th Amendment, which made Prohibition the law of the land.
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.
Although it is inaccurate in the sense that none of this deadly business began in 1926, the factoid we set out to investigate wasn't entirely wrong in citing that year as a pivotal one. Blum points out that the spate of alcohol-related poisonings that culminated in so many fatalities on New Year's Day 1927 actually commenced a week earlier, on Christmas:
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