Title: The U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition, Killing Thousands of Serfs Source:
Libertarian News URL Source:https://www.libertariannews.org/201 ... on-killing-thousands-of-serfs/ Published:Aug 11, 2011 Author:Michael Suede Post Date:2015-11-19 11:20:16 by Deckard Keywords:None Views:5700 Comments:26
This is your State in action.
These are the people you cheer at rallies chanting “God Bless America” as the war anthem plays.
They hate you. They have always hated you. And they want you dead.
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
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. [I object to the use of the word “killed” which should more appropriately be “murdered”]
Bureaucrats are no different today. Do not mistake the passage of time for a change in bureaucratic mindsets. Today they go about murdering you by monopolizing drugs through patents and preventing competition through licensing, but the effects are still the same. You die while they profit.
I apologize that this article has to come from Slate magazine, which makes disgusting excuses for State tyranny on a regular basis. For example, consider the Orwellian logic it takes to write this sentence:
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.
Do the writers at Slate have more than one logic cell in their brain? Doubtful.
But setting the obvious Orwellian editorializing aside, the meat of the article gets at the true nature of how State bureaucrats regard the public. The public to the State is as a cow is to a farmer. A farmer would have no problems slaughtering a cow that he disapproved of in some way. A farmer would have no problems killing a cow to rid the herd of a disease. A farmer does not have compassion for a cow. A farmer uses the cow to sustain his lively hood. The farmer does not tolerate insolence from a cow and will punish it through the use of cattle prods [tasers], whips [batons], and electric fences [prisons] in order to make the cow do his bidding.
If the cow could elect which farmer beat it into submission, does that make the cow free?
Listen to economist/historian Robert Higgs argue against The Leviathan
Just think for a moment. Bathroom gin wasn't the safest stuff to drink. White lightning is the same way. Many people drink rubbing alcohol and other products with alcohol. There is also poisoning by simply drinking too much of the stuff. The government wouldn't have to poison anyone when the people do it to themselves.
Many people drink rubbing alcohol and other products with alcohol.
I thought for a long time that isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) was dangerously poisonous like methanol. It's really not. It's more intoxicating, tastes terrible, and you'll probably end up with an awful hangover. However, the biggest risk of drinking is alcohol poisoning as it is more potent than ethanol.
