About 60 people appeared in New York Hospital on Christmas Eve in 1926. They all had syndromes of severe poisoning. As it turned out, from this year, the Government began implementing pour poison into alcohol to teach recalcitrant citizens. For 7 years, until the end of Prohibition the State killed at least 10,000 people.
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Deborah Blum
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
Editor
It wasn't just the violent Prohibition-era gang wars that were dangerous to Americans drinking homemade moonshine and bathtub gin. According to the Dec. 26, 1922 edition of the New York Times, five people were killed in the city on Christmas Day from drinking "poisoned rum." That was only the beginning.
