Americans knew their booze was poisoned—and drank it anyway

When jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke poured himself a drink in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928, he didn’t know his luck had just run as dry as the nation’s taps. He collapsed while performing, and in the coming years his health rapidly declined. Although he was a known alcoholic, Beiderbecke’s death from pneumonia at age 28 was still shocking. Some speculate it wasn’t just an infection that killed one of the greatest cornetists of the twenties; he’d been poisoned. The likely culprit? A government policy that made drinking alcohol not just illegal—but lethal.

During Prohibition, the so-called “noble experiment,” not all alcohol was banned—just that which was drinkable, nonmedicinal, and nonreligious. To prevent bootleggers from using industrial alcohol, the United States government denatured it by adding toxic chemicals like methanol and benzene to render it undrinkable and gave manufacturers tax exemptions if enough toxic additives were included. The public knew: A New York Times headline at the time read “Government to Double Alcohol Poison Content.” By the end of Prohibition in 1933, more than 10,000 Americans had died from imbibing tainted booze.

The drink that poisoned a generation

Bootleggers, eager to meet demand for liquor, stole, redistilled, and diluted industrial alcohol to counteract the toxic additives. Thousands of people died in what researchers have called the “chemist’s war of Prohibition.”

“It was more out of ignorance than actually trying to kill people who drink,” says Zach Jensen, a content editor at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “I blame the bootleggers. They deliberately passed off poisonous alcohol as legitimate, but I don’t think the government is completely inculpable.”

That culpability didn’t go unnoticed. For instance, Charles Norris, New York City’s first chief medical examiner, was a leading voice against alcohol’s denaturation, calling it “our noble experiment—in extermination.”

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“Generally, politicians don’t like to kill people that elect them,” says Peter Liebhold, a Smithsonian curator emeritus. “Even criminal organizations don’t like killing their consumers because they’re in the business of selling stuff.”

But on Christmas Eve of 1926, sixty people wound up in New York’s Bellevue Hospital from drinking tainted liquor. Eight didn’t live past Christmas, and in the following days, the death toll climbed to 23, with dozens more blinded.

Horrified, Norris swiftly gathered the press. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol  . . .  yet it continues its poisoning process, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison,” he told reporters. “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.”

A policy with unequal costs

But not everyone saw the government as the villain. Wayne Wheeler, counsel and key leader of the Anti-Saloon League, argued that blame didn’t lie with the law but with drinkers themselves. “The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide,” Wheeler said in a 1926 statement. “The very fact that men will gamble with their lives to get a drink of liquor shows how deeply this habit was fixed . . . To root out a bad habit like that costs many lives and long years of effort.”

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That statement outraged some lawmakers. New Jersey Senator Edward Irving Edwards called it “legalized murder” and declared the government “an accessory to the crime.”

However, according to Liebhold, while the government denatured alcohol to prevent consumption, it was criminals who made it available—often in dangerously impure conditions.

So, was it murder? Maybe not. But the government’s attitude was that if you’re willing to drink, you’ll suffer the consequences—which weren’t equally felt. Wealthier Americans could obtain government-approved medical whiskey or sip cocktails overseas on booze cruises. Working-class communities and people of color lacked such options and were often the ones drinking what was available—and dying from it.

One popular liquor alternative was “Jake,” slang for the patent medicine Jamaica Ginger, which contained up to 95 percent alcohol. But the government mandated that nonprescription bottles of it contain a high content of bitter ginger oleoresin to deter people from drinking it. To avoid detection, and make the drink more palatable, manufacturers instead added triorthocresyl phosphate (TOCP), an industrial plasticizer that mimicked the look of the ginger oleoresin.

This slow-acting neurotoxin attacked the nervous system, causing paralysis or a distinctive limp that became known as “Jake Leg.” About 35,000 Americans joined the United Victims of Ginger Paralysis Association and though the exact number is unknown, estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000 affected.

Bluesman Ishman Bracey memorialized the condition in his song “Jake Liquor Blues,” singing, “It’s the doggonest disease ever heard of since I been born. You get numb in front of your body, you can’t carry any lovin’ on.”

The government as a moral authority

While framed as a moral crusade, Prohibition was also political. Seven years before it’s enactment, the 16th Amendment created a federal income tax—enabling the loss of government revenue from drinking alcohol. Denaturing industrial alcohol made it unfit for consumption and, therefore, untaxable.

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“After a period of time, they knew they were killing people—and they didn’t stop,” says Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, author, and expert on the history of poison in America. “I don’t think they were intentionally trying to kill people, but they were, so I think that’s the acceptance of collateral damage, like in any war.”

Harvard history professor Lisa McGirr argues in her book The War on Alcohol that this was really the rise of the penal state. It saw the growth of wiretapping, a surge in incarceration, and increased federal policing—practices that would later expand during the War on Drugs and beyond.

“It’s the people who pay when governments give themselves the mantle of moral authority and high ground that justifies—whatever I do is justified because I’m doing it for your good,” Blum says. “And I decide what your good is.”