This week (January 14, 2015), two strange spates of death-by-drinking made news, when dozens of people died from drinking possibly-poisoned beer in Mozambique and another large group was struck down by bad liquor in India. The idea of “poisoned” or contaminated unlicensed alcohol may strike American readers as a problem for people elsewhere in the world to worry about, but the U.S. actually has an extensive history with deaths from poisoned alcohol — and that’s not to mention the thousands of deaths a year that, even today, can be traced to alcohol poisoning from supposedly safe, legal drinks.
Whether the deaths occur in 2012 in Prague or in 1922 in New York, stories about “poison” alcohol tend to be about moonshine that contains methanol. Methanol (wood alcohol) appears in many industrial products, like formaldehyde and fuel, that are cheaper and stronger than ethanol (the alcohol you drink); it’s also really toxic. Whether it’s sold to drinkers on purpose to bring down the cost of producing booze or accidentally, by a well-meaning but ignorant moonshiner, drinking methanol can lead to blindness, respiratory paralysis or death. That’s true around the world and across the decades.
But there is one way in which Prohibition-era alcohol deaths differed from those that make news today: in the 1920s, the U.S. government was, in a way, responsible for the poison.
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