US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition 630
Hugh Pickens writes "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. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. 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. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"
Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Informative)
As a recovering alcoholic, they needn't have bothered. Alcohol/ethanol, after being processed by the liver into ethene at much expense of your vitamin B suppplies amongst other things acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter to the brain, ie. it shuts down certain brain functions by binding to receptors normally associated with dopamine. It also blocks the production of seratonine, which does the opposite.
After years of abuse, through the natural process of brain cells naturally dying and being re-cultivated, you start to overproduce excitatory emitters and underproduce inhibitory emitters. Eventually, your brain goes mental, and after going cold-turkey you feel like you want to crawl up into a ball and hide somewhere dark and quiet. In worse cases, alcohol withdrawal can kill you.
Brain cells last a long time. I spent 6 months with a neurological illness after 10 years of abuse.
All I can say is that the smell of the stuff now makes me feel physically sick. Poisoning it to harm people who never had a problem is just going to make even more people ill.
Then again, neuroscience wasn't really the world's strong point in the 20s.
Eh, the people HAD a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"I always find it funny that people who risk jail time for a drug claim they haven't got a problem. "No sirree, I am not a drunk. Yes I am drinking industrial alcohol laced with rat poison for flavor sold to me by outragous prices and I could go to jail for it, but really, I got it all under control."
Apparently we haha when someone offs them self doing something stupid like swimming with sharks with a bloody cut, but when someone does something Darwin like drinking poisoned alcohol, bust out the sympathy cards. Stupid is stupid and it's not going to get any smarter by justifying it.
Re:Eh, the people HAD a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"I always find it funny that people who risk jail time for a drug claim they haven't got a problem.
Laws against doing something don't make something wrong to do, laws can at most reflect a judgement by society that something is wrong to do. The US, like most countries, wouldn't exist if people only did things that are legal. Slavery wasn't the right thing to do before it was illegal. And drinking alcohol wasn't fine to do, then not fine to do, then fine to do depending on the decade you're in.
Maybe the problem isn't that people's alcohol problem compelled them to drink alcohol with rat poison in it, maybe the problem was that people were *secretly* putting rat poison in alcohol in a deliberate effort to kill enough people that the rest would be forced to toe the line.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The sad thing is that they still haven't learned.
Look at the current drug policies.
They're utterly self defeating and create a situation which makes the problems they're supposed to address worse.
This explains the gritweed/killer weed. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying the government is behind the weed found with lead in it, but after reading this I wouldn't be surprised. http://stopthedrugwar.org/reader_blogs/2008/apr/18/marijuana_lead_laced_pot_newest_ [stopthedrugwar.org]
Re:This explains the gritweed/killer weed. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but the government IS behind making all cigarette smokers smoke FSC, and it seems to make them MORE dangerous as the cherries fall out of the ends! Do your cigarettes seem to be going out for no reason, do you cough more lately, or have other symptoms??? Check out FSC and get ready to be pissed! To prevent several hundred people from dying by burning the house down, eveyone who doesn't roll their own (millions in America) is going to smoke have to smoke carpet glue!
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-11705-NY-Holistic-Body--Spirit-Examiner~y2009m7d12-Are-the-new-FSC-firesafe-cigarettes-making-smokers-sicker-than-ever [examiner.com]
Re:This explains the gritweed/killer weed. (Score:5, Interesting)
so because someone chooses to ingest one kind or some kinds of poison(s), it's perfectly legitimate to force other poisons on them withour their consent and/or against their will?
it's fascist wowser harm-maximisation thinking like yours that prevents safer forms of nicotine ingestion from being available on the market. ditto for other drugs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This explains the gritweed/killer weed. (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, talk about completely missing the entire point of this article. You honestly think government mandated poison is a good idea? You are one sick fuck.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
One time I got really drunk and fell down on the sidewalk breaking my nose. When I got home I told my Mom that I had gotten in a horrid fight. I told her a man beat me up and forced me to drink till I passed out... "You're a goddamned liar ," she said. I saw you and your dad drinking out back and you fell down right in front of me on the way up the drive ... How stupid do you think I am? "Stupid enough to think dad still loves you," I said. You could hear my dad laughing from way down the street. Damn ... t
Re:Let me tell you a story. It's called, PARAQUAT (Score:4, Interesting)
I do wonder though, industrial alcohol kills whether or not poison is added to it (and home-brewed alcohol is even worse). You could actually formulate this very same policy as trying to get people not to drink the poison by making it taste bad.
The only statistics are the deaths caused by alcohol poisoning, not a single death case reports that the strychnine had anything to do with the death (any kid and his dog will clearly see the difference in a corpse between alcohol poisoning and strychnine poisoning. Someone dying from strychnine poisoning *will* have died in an extremely cramped position, all muscles totally stretched, while alcohol poisoning will slowly lead to multiple organ failure, in other words, they wouldn't have missed it). And every society that outlaws drinkable alcohol, whether or not they poison it, will have lots of dead people on it's hands.
Every large city in the middle east, excepting Israel, has between hundreds and thousands of dead on it's hands due to use of selfmade or industrial alcohol every year. Not 70-year old people dying from liver failure that "probably" was caused by long-term alcohol poisoning like sometimes happens in America (which is a very peaceful way to die, incidentally), but 20 year old, perfectly fit men and women dying painfully after arriving in the hospital. Ryadh, the capital of the saudi women-stoning "kingdom of madness", has over a 1000 dead from alcohol poisoning yearly (including the son of the police chief a few years back, guess he couldn't get the money for imported alcohol from daddy).
Drinkable alcohol is a purified form of ethyl-alcohol. Industrial alcohol is (mostly) Methanol [wikipedia.org]. It has an LD50 of 0.4g/kg. Which means that drinking 70 cl whisky made with methyl-alcohol will kill 50% of the people who drink it.
A third of a bottle of orange juice with just enough methanol to make it taste more or less like a wine will also kill 50% of the poeple who drink it.
Perhaps it's just me, but these numbers could easily have caused 20000 deaths during the prohibition without any help from the government. It seems to me the government would have to have added quite a bit of poison to even match the natural poisonous nature of illegal alcohol, to raise it would very, very easily have resulted in contamination of the entire food chain, which obviously didn't happen. So perhaps it's time to give the benefit of the doubt here, and not blame the government for the deaths of people who were poisoning themselves.
Btw : who voted in these policies ? Well, prohibition :
64th Congress (1915-1917)
Majority Party: Democrat (56 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (40 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
Who voted in the poisoning policy ?
65th Congress (1917-1919)
Majority Party: Democrat (54 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (42 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
And who voted it out ?
66th Congress (1919-1921)
Majority Party: Republican (49 seats)
Minority Party: Democrat (47 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
(The grandfather of Al Gore had a lot to do with these policies, man, talk about a guy that just does not have a very good history)
Re:Let me tell you a story. It's called, PARAQUAT (Score:4, Informative)
The enabling legislation for prohibition, The Volstead Act [wikipedia.org], was passed by Congress on October 18 1919, and Wilson's veto overridden on 28 October 1919 . The vote in the Senate was 65-20 (38 Republicans and 27 Democrats voted for the measure. 9 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted against it.) [nytimes.com] and 176-55 in the house [nytimes.com]. The bill's sponsor, Andrew Volstead, was a Republican.
The 21st amendment was passed by Congress on February 20,1933. The Cullen Harrison Act, which legalized 3.2 % beer, passed congress in March 21, 1933. It passed the House by a vote of 316-97. Because of copyright restrictions, I can't easily find the roll calls, but congress was overwhelmingly Democratic.
Members of both parties advocated for and against prohibition-- it was not a "partisan" issue. If you seek a party to blame, however, be aware that the man ultimately responsible for supervising prohibition enforcement., Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, was a Republican.
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget, they tried to poison pot, too.
It was during the Nixon Administration, if I remember correctly. And sadly, there was never a US president who could have used a few bong hits more than him.
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Informative)
Only some religionists. Others drink alcohol in their ceremonies (e.g. Anglican Christians, and plenty of pagans, druids etc)
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just Anglican Christians. Monks and Monasteries have a long association with the production of drinking alcohol, including wines. Anyway until very recently, in Europe, beer was drunk by just about everyone (drinking untreated water tended to be rather lethal). To the extent that people who's ancestors drank beer are much more able to deal with alcohol than those who's ancestors didn't.
temperance movement (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure you can lay all the blame for the temperance movement upon christianity, substantial blame also rests with the women's right advocates. Ironically, woman's rights has generally been an astounding atheistic movement throughout the last two centuries, with the temperance movement being uniquely both religious and disastrous.
That said, authoritarian and/or religiously motivated men were the ones who imposed and implemented the poisoning. So yes you may lay these 10,000 deaths at the feet of auth
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's fair to equate authoritarianism with christianity. As far as I can tell, christianity is directly opposed authoritarianism. Don't get me wrong, many who claim to be christian advocate authoritarianism, but is it really fair to say that someone subscribes to a philosophy when they either fail to grasp one of it's basic tenants, willfully ignore it, or are lying specifically to give the false impression they subscribe to the philosophy?
Like the other poster said, how can someone claim to
Re:temperance movement (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, christianity is directly opposed authoritarianism.
So can you explain the role of God in your non-authoritarian Christianity?
Re:temperance movement (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>To give everyone a chance at salvation and allow us to find our own paths with the free will bestowed upon us?
And spend eternity burning in hell if you choose the wrong thing. That's like a government that tolerates Free Speech Protesters for a few years and then decides, "That's enough" and runs over them with tanks and/or make them disappear in a prison.
NOT free will.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He might be from one of the variants that considers Jesus to have brought "a new pact" and thus rendering the Old Testament deprecated.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fairly early on in it's history Christianity was adop
Re:temperance movement (Score:4, Insightful)
...many who claim to be christian advocate authoritarianism,
Sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy [wikipedia.org] to me. Christianity is defined by its followers, and only by its tenets in how its followers take them up.
Its like saying the Judeo-Christian religions are peaceful because one of the Ten Commandments says "thou shall not murder". Or saying politicians are inherently honest because all of them claim to be truthful.
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:4, Funny)
That's nothing! They're against blowjobs, too, if you can believe that. You can look it up.
What kind of sick view of the world warps a person to the point where they believe that having someone brush their teeth with the old meat whistle is actually a bad thing?
Seriously.
I think I was a freshman in high school when one of the Jesuits at the catholic high school I attended said that oral sex was sinful because it was a sexual act that did not give glory to the Lord as a reproductive act. That was when I realized there could not be a god that would give us peckers and mouths and then say "Oh, by the way...use them and you will burn for eternity!?. It just defied any sort of logic IMO.
That was about the end of organized religion for me. Although I did once go to a Catholic Youth Organization function once more because I thought I might be able to get Patti O'Connor to give me a wobble job if I was really nice to her and appeared to be a devout person. It didn't work, so I never again darkened the door of a religious institution.
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:5, Funny)
That's the exact opposite of what the priest told me back when I was in the boy choir.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever Christianity is criticized someone has to come up with an answer that they are doing it wrong and they are not *real* Christians. Now if I interpret your answer correctly, your branch of Christianity (and the Bible) promotes/approves oral sex and pre-marital wobble jobs, right?
Re:Gov't for the people, by the people (Score:4, Insightful)
So yes, pedophilia being abhorrent to most people is exactly the same as oral sex being abhorrent to some people. Even though one can make logically valid arguments as to why it's bad, most people immediately become irrational when it's mentioned and detest it because they are expected to do so. (Besides, the arguments against oral sex are also logically valid; they merely have some premises most people assume to be false.)
Note that I'm not defending pedophilia here. It's bad for a number of reasons but we need to stop kneejerking every time it's mentioned. All that does accomplish is to make it impossible for us to actually deal with the issue. We need to get rid of that berserk button.
* Does it count as a Godwin when I invoke Gowin's Law to illustrate a point?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that there is way too much scaremongering over pedophilia, and it's ridiciluous the way it's treated as a thought crime.
But that doesn't mean equating oral sex to sex with children is valid. What next? If I was disagreeing with someone who says that gay sex between adults was wrong, are you going to say "Well his view is equally valid as someone who believes that raping babies and then eating them is wrong"? No, it's not equally valid. Yes, there's a debate to be had on when children can consent. Bu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Religionists are against booze,
Many of the religious folk were certainly supporters but could not have been the primary mover. Look at the who controlled the government at the time, it was the Progressives. There were many reasons[1] that movement quickly disowned the name for the better part of a century before recently deciding that, their prior victims mostly dead of old age and the official histories carefully cleansed, they could reclaim the name and move openly against the Republic once again.
[
Eventually, Chuck Norris put a stop to it (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA:
"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
And today: (Score:3, Interesting)
The penalty for drinking untaxed alcohol is still death or blindness.
Not if you do it right, the info is out there (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the home brewing and other do-it-yourself alcohol production communities would beg to differ with you. You only run into any real risk when you start distilling anyway.
Re:Not if you do it right, the info is out there (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm, you do know that methanol is added to any ethanol not intended (or taxed) for human consumption, don't you? That is, the government would rather have people die or go blind than risk letting someone get away with evading a sin tax.
Re:Not if you do it right, the info is out there (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If surgeons on the front lines in Korea can do it, anyone can. Plus, we've got this thing called the Internet nowadays. In the twenty first century, humans can find out the right way to do a great many things, very easily.
The more you know!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ah yes... (Score:5, Informative)
Very much like the US still poisons its opiates by adding acetaminophen to them to ensure that they cannot be taken in very high doses? Ah, the war on drugs!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Let me fix that for you.
All better. (:
Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Informative)
And let me fix that for you.
Ah, the war on some drugs and a friggin' plant and the American people!
Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Interesting)
The trivialisation angle doesn't work, since it tends to cuts both ways, i.e. if it's just a friggin' plant, then why are people so attached to smoking it?
Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya I've never liked the argument that because marijuana is natural it must be safe/harmless. No, not really. Plenty of dangerous natural shit out there. Some of the most deadly venoms known are from natural sources. That something is natural has no bearing at all on if it is safe or healthy or anything else.
Now, that said, marijuana is rather safe and non-addictive, and as such ought to be legalized. However the reason to legalize it is because it is safe and we have science showing that, not because it is natural.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the reason to legalize marijuana is because free people have a right to put whatever they want into their own bodies.
Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I have very few real problems with the legalization of marijuana except for one. The preferred method of ingestion is smoking and smoke is very rarely contained. *I* don't want to smoke marijuana whether directly or through second hand smoke. Even if only legal in one's own home, I have enough problem with people smoking cigarettes on their porch/balcony and having it waft through my bedroom window. As a recreational drug, someone's enjoyment of it shouldn't result in me having to smell it. As stupid as it is, the current illegal status of marijuana makes conversations like, "Would you please not smoke a joint right under my bedroom window" much easier than its tobacco oriented counterpart.
Smoking is only popular because pot is expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
, due to it's illegal status. Smoking is the method of consumption that gives the user the maximum effect from the minimum amount of pot. This is important when dealing with an illegal commodity that costs hundreds of dollars per ounce.
If pot were legal, the costs would be more in line with what it is, a dried herb. This would allow users to ingest it in less efficient ways, such as putting it in food. Someone eating a brownie under your bedroom window isn't going to annoy you that much, is it?
Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
they came to us through purely natural process.
Other things that are natural: snake poison, cancer, meteorites. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's healthy. I have no strong opinion about whether or not marijuana should be legal, but the "it's completely natural" argument doesn't work for me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Informative)
The acetaminophen is not to poison a hard abuser; in fact, most doctors would prefer to prescribe the opiate-only preparations due to the toxicity of APAP at high dosages.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Feds still going on (Score:4, Interesting)
Had a parent injured by several modern malpractices and pharmacides, turned out the way to survive was doing some older things that made simple biochemical sense. Much, much better now and I have objective measures to demonstrate it.
Re:Feds still going on (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid doctors are as much to blame for this as the FDA. When a drug company's patent is about to expire, they often superficially change the molecular structure of the popular drug so that they can get a new patent. Then they start the marketing blitz to "ask your doctor about" the new drug. Smart doctors will prescribe the proven cure over the patent cash-in drugs.
Re:Feds still going on (Score:5, Insightful)
Several hundred thousand die per year? So it's half as bad as cancer or heart disease? I find that very hard to believe. And federally mandated poisoning? No one is forcing patients to take these drugs. Taking these drugs is a risk patients willingly take since, if they have a deadly disease, doing nothing itself has a high mortality rate.
That medical examiner's name? (Score:5, Funny)
In TFA: Charles Norris.
Because back in the day, he was just a medical examiner. He got the nickname "Chuck" from his ability to punch someone so hard they essentially became very similar to ground chuck.
Re:That medical examiner's name? (Score:4, Funny)
Denaturing Alcohol is standard practice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Denaturing alcohol is a common practice even today to prevent tax dodging, perhaps the best mass-scale denaturing occurring today is in Ethanol plants.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But you did not balance your statement... denaturing is meant to make you FEEL sick so you don't want to drink the stuff. If you pushed past the nausea and drank the stuff anyways, you will NOT die with denatured alcohol.
This was just government sanctioned murder for political purposes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
c.f. Wikipedia: "Denatured alcohol is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous and/or unpalatable, and thus, undrinkable."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but most of the time the denaturing is done by adding something that will make you feel sick and make the liquid in question taste horrible, and this is clearly pointed out on the containers. In fact, I've seen people drink more than a liter of modern denatured alcohol with the only side effect that they felt a little sick (gotta love some of the characters that show up at music festivals).
/Mikael
Re:Denaturing Alcohol is standard practice... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can drink methanol with no ill effect.
You simply have to remain constantly drunk on ethanol for a week+ after.
The liver is what turns methanol into the real toxins that kill you.
It 'prefers' to metabolize ethanol.
The kidneys excrete methanol unmetabolized.
If you stay drunk on good quality booze for long enough you will pee out all the methanol.
During prohibition they used shit like _mercury_ salts to denature alcohol.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In some cases(various household chemicals that a toxicologist really wouldn't recommend drinking, nail polish remover, antifreeze, that sort of thing) Denatonium [wikipedia.org] is used. Horribly bitter; but basically harmless. A lot of alcohol, though, still gets the good, old-fashioned methanol denaturing treatment; which can and will play hell with the consumer.
The more things change... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a good thing we no longer do things like that. You know, like add tylenol (APAP) to opiate painkillers so that if you abuse them you die of liver failure. Cause that wouldn't be cool at all.
Re:The more things change... (Score:5, Funny)
But... but... but... otherwise they would be throwing their lives away! We will not let them die of substance abuse, even if it kills them!
Too soon?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course not. And that BS about adding caffeine to the aforementionned mix has nothing at all to do with increasing the rate of absorption, and is all about making you jittery while your liver is failing. Those bastards!
Re:The more things change... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dude, have you ever tried opiates? (I mean, in the socially-acceptable, medical way.) Adding acetaminophen to Vicodin is like adding vanilla extract to a bottle of tequila.
Re:The more things change... (Score:4, Informative)
no intelligent comment has ever started with "Dude." acetaminophen (APAP) is added to oxycodone to make vicodin because it makes the drug more effective. opiates are good at relieving pain quickly, but don't work great for prolonged pain. By adding APAP the dose interval is increased. There have been many of studies comparing opiates w/o APAP and opiates w/ APAP for relieving moderate pain and the synergy of opiates and APAP is well established.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, I stand corrected.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> no intelligent comment has ever started with "Dude."
That's rather harsh coming from someone who doesn't capitalize their sentences!
More Atrocities: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are reading my words with disbelief, I suggest that you visit the Web link that I have provided. The TSE was real and was an atrocity committed by the American government against its own citizens.
President Bill Clinton ultimately apologized to the victims and their families.
Re:More Atrocities: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experime (Score:5, Informative)
Let's keep it going:
Eugenics Board of North Carolina [wikipedia.org]
Emp. added via bold on the interesting parts:
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina (EBNC) was an agency of the U.S. state of North Carolina created in 1933 after the state legislature authorized the practice of eugenics by state officials four years earlier.
In 1971, an act of the legislature transferred the EBNC to the newly created Department of Human Resources (DHR), and the secretary of that department was given managerial and executive authority over the board. Under a 1973 law, the Eugenics Board was transformed into the Eugenics Commission. Members of the commission were appointed by the governor and included the director of the Division of Social and Rehabilitative Services of the DHR, the director of Health Services, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane, the chief medical officer of the DHR in the area of mental health services, and the state attorney general. In 1974 the legislature transferred to the judicial system the responsibility for any sterilization proceedings against persons suffering from mental illness or mental retardation.
The Eugenics Commission was formally abolished by the legislature in 1977.
The board sterilized about 7,600 people, many of them against their will, between 1929 and 1974, in an attempt to remove mental illness and "social misbehaviour" from the gene pool. Among the victims were 2000 young people, some as young as ten years old.
Gotta love the government.
Re:More Atrocities: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experime (Score:4, Insightful)
The gov't didn't INJECT them with syphilis... (Score:5, Informative)
They studied men who already HAD the disease, and allowed it to progress untreated to see what would happen.
Still completely unethical, and one of the more atrocious chapters in US medical history. But claiming that the patients were intentionally infected with syphilis by gov't docs is simply wrong, and gives ammunition to those who would deny that the whole thing ever happened.
OTOH, the government did intentionally inject people (including mentally retarded children) with radioactive isotopes to see what the effects of nuclear fallout would be.
Re:More Atrocities: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experime (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a matter of not being able to believe the government would ever do such a thing. It's laughed at because the same people who would call a government review board a "death panel" fully support the private "death panels" each insurance company has.
Re:More Atrocities: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experime (Score:5, Insightful)
It's laughed at because the same people who would call a government review board a "death panel" fully support the private "death panels" each insurance company has.
Totally. That's what's bugged me about the whole "death panel" fubar from the beginning - we've ALREADY got them and the only people who aren't beholden to death panels are the uninsured.
Re:Insurance is voluntary. Government is not. (Score:5, Insightful)
An insurance company can't prevent you from being treated for a condition.
Total, unfiltered denial of reality.
If a medical procedure costs $400,000 and I have $400 in my bank account, and my insurance company says "We're not going to cover it." they are essentially PREVENTING me from being treated. If the treatment would save my life, they are effectively a "private death panel".
Stop and think about it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Still goes on. Ever heard of Denatured Alcohol? (Score:5, Informative)
The BATF has a list of approved formulas which must be used to render ethanol undrinkable in order to avoid federal excise taxes. The list is available here:
http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/27cfr21_03.html [gpo.gov]
The denaturants used range from simply nasty-tasting, to nausea-inducing, to downright lethal.
Apparently, Uncle Sam would rather you be dead or blind than getting driunk without paying the booze taxes...
Re:Still goes on. Ever heard of Denatured Alcohol? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about all the people who need denatured alcohols in an industrial or commercial fashion? I'm a construction contractor and I use all the time as a solvent. I for one would rather not have to pay those taxes.
If they chose to drink something that is clearly harmful, why should I give a damn?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then get rid of the poison *and* the tax. Duh.
You think it's better for people to die than to get drunk cheap. Fuck you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
not that different today (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation today is not that different. For example, deaths in the US and Mexico arising from heroin generally fall into two classes: (1) deaths because importing and selling heroin often involves violent criminal gangs, and (2) deaths because illegal heroin is impure. Both categories of deaths are purely government-inflicted, in the sense that the US government could end them tomorrow if it chose to legalize heroin.
Category #1 is pretty obvious: no more drug-related shootings if the stuff is being grown, imported, refined, packaged, and sold legally.
Category #2 is less well known to most people. When opiates were legal, people would generally just smoke opium. It had some bad health effects (e.g., constipation), but nothing all that deadly. People weren't overdosing from it. If you smoked too much, you fell asleep. Opium was legal in the US until around the turn of the 20th century. During most of the 20th century in the US, people were using extremely impure heroin. The impurities had two effects. One was that if it was maybe 10% heroin and 90% other ingredients, you couldn't get high from smoking or snorting it, so you had to inject it. AIDS transmission through shared needles wouldn't exist if heroin wasn't so impure that it had to be injected. The other was that the impurities themselves (often really nasty, random stuff like Ajax cleanser) could have devastating health effects. When you see a heroin addict who's lost all his teeth, it's because of the impurities, not the drug itself.
More recently, people have started to use black tar heroin imported from Mexico. Here [latimes.com] is a series of articles about black tar heroin from the LA Times. This stuff is much cheaper than traditional heroin, so you don't get as many property crimes because druggies are stealing to support their habits. However, the black crud tends to cause collapsed veins and other problems. Also, a lot of people are overdosing because the black tar is stronger than they're used to. If heroin were legal, people would be able to look at the packaging and get accurate information about its strength.
Let's legalize heroin in the US tomorrow. Mexico could pull back from being on the verge of becoming a failed state. People in the US would stop dying. Violent and nonviolent crime would be reduced. The prison population would be greatly reduced. The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, due almost entirely to the failed war on drugs. Keeping all those people in jail is extremely expensive. E.g., California spends more on prisons than on higher education.
Re:not that different today (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. When you take the profit out of it, they stop. The only reasons gangs exist in the USA is because of prohibition. The mob tried to get in, and was stuck doing things like garbage collection. But Prohibition funded them directly, and they gained a foothold. That let them fund less profitable ventures, like protection rackets, prostitution, and tax evasion. Make all the illegal stuff legal, and the funding of gangs ends. No more money, no more guns. No guns, no violence.
But the Puritanical US won't let that happen here, and pushes hard to make others conform to our morality. Nothing is worse than religion... "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians." God is fine, the people that claim to be following Him are the problem...
When you take away what people have been fighting over, and that fighting gave them power, they will just find something else to fight over.
You seem very confused. These aren't idealistic people fighting for or against anything. They are capitalists where the rules of capitalism require enforcing their own contracts through violence and they are allowed to create barriers of entry for competitors (those barriers of entry being served via lead). They don't fight because it is a fun way to pass the time. They fight because it makes them lots of money. Make it legal, tax it, and you'll have the government funding increase while their funding decreases. They'll move on to profiting from the next victimless crime, and if you get rid of them all, they'll get a job.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that's why despite the repeal of the prohibition the Mafia is still as strong as ever. Right.
I think that political reasons and economic reasons work differently. Political reasons are easily changeable, especially if they change slowly, by shifting to "new threats" or becoming more radical. The way of running a political organization stays about the same, the funding source doesn't necessarily change, people with experience in some area retain their expertise.
But economical reasons aren't so flexible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
summary is flamebait! (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically the bootleggers were defrauding the drinkers during prohibition by replacing the cheap (but legal for industrial uses) Methanol which can lead to blindness and ultimately death. The underground market was defrauding and poisoning people wholesale. So in effect, the Methanol was only safe to be used in industrial products as it was and would never have poisoned people if it had not been fraudulently added to alcoholic beverages in the first place. That isn't to say the government wasn't wrong, it most certainly was as is the entire concept of a drug war in of its self, it is that these underground markets were knowingly putting tainted Methanol into their products and killing drinkers as a result.
Still happening (Score:5, Informative)
This is still going on today with other illegal substances. The US has, for example, been poisoning marijuana fields with paraquat for decades.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Paraquat is a herbicide. It's effects on the marijuana should be fast enough that it can't be sold and used. Statistics show that only a very small number of human deaths from the agent are unintentional, so I don't even see any POTENTIAL basis for your claim.
Booze hounds have drunk wood (methyl) alcohol (Score:4, Interesting)
Denatured alcohol wasn't the only poisonous alcohol people drank. Some people drank wood alcohol (methanol), which is itself poisonous. I remember hearing of a concoction called "smoke" that was wood alcohol mixed with water. The people who drank it were called "smoke hounds". It could make them blind and kill them, but they drank it anyway. I once heard of a blind musician who had become blind by drinking smoke when he was in prison.
Some people are crazy enough to drink anything, poison or not.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
The bottles were marked poison before the government started doing this, because the industrial alcohol IS poison, even before the government started meddling.
To avoid the excise tax on liquors, industrial alcohol has to have methanol added to it.
The mathonal makes it even more toxic than ordinary ethanol, and unsuitable for drinking. But is required for it to be tax exempt.
Anyways, the issue is during the prohbition, some people were already drinking that unsuitable stuff. They were desperate, they were (probably) addicted, they took what they could get. So a lot of people were drinking this (a bit) industrial alcohol containing some [probably small] quantity of poisonous methanol.
So then the government' comes up with this "solution" is to make the stuff more deadly.... swiftly and quietly...brilliant!
Just because they didn't keep it a secret doesn't mean everyone automatically knew about it.
Or even that they had a good alternative.
Re:Listen you Dolts (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we don't "poison" antifreeze with ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used because it makes a good antifreeze.
Unadulterated ethanol would be perfectly usable for most industrial purposes. But the government mandates the addition of other toxic substances which serve no purpose other than making the ethanol unusable as an intoxicant. That is the key difference here.
Re:Methanol (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact remains that these bootleggers were adding a chemical that was already known to be poisonous and extremely dangerous to drink. It's like complaining that the government put strychnine in gasoline and since bootleggers were adding gasoline to their drinks the government was solely responsible for deaths. No. These bootleggers put poison in their products to begin with; they knew it was killing people and they did it anyway.
Hydrogen Dioxide? As in HO2? (Score:3, Funny)
Care to share the structural formula for that one, before you head out to claim your Nobel in chemistry?
Not progressive by any reasonable definition... (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to burst your bubble, but presidents have nothing to do with Constitutional amendments
You are correct on that part. However, prohibition did not actually prohibit anything until the passage of the Volstead Act [wikipedia.org] which actually defined what (product) was being prohibited. And that act was vetoed by Wilson.
This was a progressive (socialist/fascist/communist/liberal) idea
If you group socialism, fascism, communism, and liberalism all under the same umbrella, you need to actually read up on those four very different philosophical structures. There are profound differences between those four ideals, both in theory and in application.
However equally importa
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A progressive is a progressive no matter which party they are under
And why would you associate restrictions on freedom with progressive ideals?
The D or the R doesn't matter, stop thinking one party is better than the other.
I'm not sure how you came to conclude that I was saying one was better than the other. They both have plenty of problems. I'm just tired of the endless media feeds of how the current president is some sort of evil satanic islamo-fascist abortionist cannibal simply because he doesn't have an R after his name.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:while we're railing against freedom destruction (Score:4, Interesting)
You are worried about a government promoting drugs? well, that would be bad. That would about double the number of addicts. Yes, only double. Most users of hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, etc.) never become addicts. Basically there is a huge chunk of the population that is immune to addiction to most drugs. Why? They don't need what the drug provides. I'll use one of the most addictive substances known as an example.
People who try to quit smoking have about a 5% chance of succeeding cold turkey. That goes up to 15% with nicotine patches/gum. With an antidepressant? 30%.
Most addicts are depressed, or have mental illness, or too much stress, etc. This is what makes them vulnerable to 'self-medicate' to fix their troubles. Since drugs do alter the reward/pleasure centers in ways similar to what the normal mind naturally does, it does temporarily 'fix' the problem. Only it isn't permanent, it usually makes the mind even more off-balance once the drug wears off, -> classic addiction symptoms. However if the mind is already getting what it needs, then the motivation to take more isn't strong enough to cause addiction. It does a 'wow that was quite a trip' and goes on with it's life as normal. Just the way most adults who drink alcohol do.
It should be obvious to anyone that drugs aren't a serious threat to mankind. Most of them have been around for 1000's of years, and they haven't been banned until very recently. Unfortunately logic and knowledge aren't most people's strong points. What we get instead is common 'sense' like yours. (ie. whatever sense people do have in common...)
tl;dr version: Drugs are NOT the 'most successful destroyer of freedom', and banning them only makes them more successful destroyers of freedom. both for the addicts, and everyone else.
T
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Probably a side-effect of ingesting E 666, the Addidtive of the Beast.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So what's going to happen to all those "at least we aren't killing our own people" arguments offered in defence of various despicable actions carried out in Iraq by armed forces of the United States?
This is about the war on recreational drugs. You could have went with Afghanistan, where the poppies grow, that would have been appropriate.
Iraq is about oil reserves, try to keep up.