US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition
Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 27 February 2010
Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition.
The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins - adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone.
That makes your government suddenly look not so friendly anymore.