When The Government Deliberately Poisoned American Citizens
The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
"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."
The federal government never has had many compunctions about poisoning and killing americans. Apparently they kept at it for years even as people died so that the corpses would serve as examples to others, and they justified the poisoning by saying, after all, the drinkers brought it on themselves with their illegal behavior. Nice.
Also during the 1970s the feds had a program to spray marijuana fields in Mexico with paraquat, a fast acting and deadly herbicide. This chemical is extremely poisonous to humans if taken internally but the government ghouls insisted the substance was harmless when the drenched pot leaves were smoked.
This history of a government deliberately poisoning people by tampering with recreational drugs is more than interesting in light of recent deaths in Europe:
Anthrax-contaminated heroin kills drug user
"A drug user has become the first person to die in England from a batch of anthrax-contaminated heroin which has now killed 11 addicts in the UK and Germany."
"The surge of cases – the most serious anthrax outbreak in the UK in recent times – has puzzled police and health experts, who remain uncertain how or where the heroin became infected. The frequently lethal bacteria is mostly found in animals in Asia and Africa, and very rarely occurs in Europe.
They are investigating whether the heroin was contaminated at its likely source in Afghanistan, perhaps from contaminated soils or contact with infected animal skins, or was infected by a cutting agent used by drugs dealers or traffickers closer to Europe."
"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."
The federal government never has had many compunctions about poisoning and killing americans. Apparently they kept at it for years even as people died so that the corpses would serve as examples to others, and they justified the poisoning by saying, after all, the drinkers brought it on themselves with their illegal behavior. Nice.
Also during the 1970s the feds had a program to spray marijuana fields in Mexico with paraquat, a fast acting and deadly herbicide. This chemical is extremely poisonous to humans if taken internally but the government ghouls insisted the substance was harmless when the drenched pot leaves were smoked.
This history of a government deliberately poisoning people by tampering with recreational drugs is more than interesting in light of recent deaths in Europe:
Anthrax-contaminated heroin kills drug user
"A drug user has become the first person to die in England from a batch of anthrax-contaminated heroin which has now killed 11 addicts in the UK and Germany."
"The surge of cases – the most serious anthrax outbreak in the UK in recent times – has puzzled police and health experts, who remain uncertain how or where the heroin became infected. The frequently lethal bacteria is mostly found in animals in Asia and Africa, and very rarely occurs in Europe.
They are investigating whether the heroin was contaminated at its likely source in Afghanistan, perhaps from contaminated soils or contact with infected animal skins, or was infected by a cutting agent used by drugs dealers or traffickers closer to Europe."
posted by nolocontendere at 10:06 PM
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