Did you know that during prohibition the Federal Government deliberately poisoned alcohol to kill Americans to scare people? At least 10,000 people were deliberately killed.
You can read about it in an article entitled, The Chemist's War, by Deborah Blum which appeared on Slate on 02/19/10.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
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