Wake Up With A Did You Know: The American Government Intentionally Poisoned Citizens During Prohibition
This day in history is just another example of the bureaucrats in Washington just treading ALL over us when we specifically asked them not to. The Volstead Act was passed by such an overwhelming margin that it didn't even matter that Woodrow Wilson's wife exercised her veto power. That's how much the Congress wanted to stop our ancestors from boozing. Shameful.
They enacted this law and then refused to stop meddling with people who loved to get fucked up. They went so far as to poison alcohol and then knowingly give it to our citizens as a means to scare people out of drinking. Thanks to good ole fashioned booze like beer and whiskey being seized, smashed, and poured out like we see here
People turned to "industrial alcohols" to get liquored up enough to make bad decisions. Bad decisions like fucking prostitutes and drinking industrial alcohol. People would get their hands on cleaners, perfumes, and straight up grain alcohol and then they'd further filter/distill it to the point that all of the poisons in industrial alcohols were limited and then they'd take that refined grain alcohol and sweeten it up with sugars and flavors and invent these new moonshine bathtub cocktails so they could continue to live like it was the Great Gatsby all the time
The Government was getting frustrated with the people just openly disregarding this law and getting smashed every weekend like heathens so they doubled down…literally. The government doubled the amount of toxins in industrial alcohol. And this wasn't some small scale, local test on poisoning people. Nope. The estimates for how many people were poisoned by the government range from 10,000 to 100,000. Let's split the difference and call it 50k. FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE were poisoned by their elected officials. That is fucking insanity and does not get talked about enough.
A decade or so later prohibition was repealed and America went back to being a place where you were free to enjoy yourself. The Government learned their lesson. They never made a mistake like this again. Sure, they banned weed for like 100 years and now they want to take little things guns and speech, but I doubt they ever try to take booze from us again.