Category: Mass Death

• The Poisoned Alcohol Genocide

  The Poisoned Alcohol Genocide was the belief that during Prohibition the U.S. government did more than enforce alcohol bans: it knowingly made industrial alcohol lethally toxic in order to kill off drinkers, especially poorer, immigrant, urban, or politically unruly citizens who continued to defy the law. The theory grew from a very real federal policy of requiring denatured industrial alcohol to contain poisonous additives, including methanol, even though officials knew bootleggers were stealing and redistilling that alcohol for beverage use. As deaths mounted in the mid-1920s, critics described the policy as something closer to chemical punishment than public regulation. In its strongest form, the theory treated the poison program as a deliberate campaign of social killing rather than a deterrent policy with deadly consequences.