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:5115 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 Citys 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 wasthe alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptomthe 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 kills16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxesbut thats 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.
The alcohol we drink is ethanol. And it is heavily taxed. Ethanol also has industrial uses and the taxes on it are low.
In order to prevent people from selling, buying or drinking the low-tax industrial ethanol, methanol is added to it creating "denatured alcohol" (aka methylated spirits).
Denatured alcohol can cause blindness or death. During Prohibition, some of the illegal whiskey was made using denatured alcohol. People died. Too bad.
Don --- . The government wouldn't have to poison anyone ----
-- if the gov't stopped prohibiting mind altering substances...
Which our various levels of gov't have NO constitutional authority to do.
Where in our Constitution is murder, rape, etc. mentioned?
State/local govts have the constitutional power to write and enforce criminal law.
They do not have the power to prohibit dangerous substances or acts like drinking/booze, using/drugs, shooting/guns, driving/fast cars, etc...
They can 'reasonably regulate' such activities, a long as they do not infringe upon our basic inalienable rights in doing so. -- Prohibitions are infringements.
They can 'reasonably regulate' such activities, a long as they do not infringe upon our basic inalienable rights in doing so. -- Prohibitions are infringements.
Get it yet?
Think about what I just wrote, and what our Constitution tries to control. -- (Govt power)
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.
Obama has played at being a president while enjoying the perks … golf, insanely expensive vacations at tax-payer expense. He has ignored the responsibilities of the job; no plans, no budgets, no alternatives … just finger pointing; making him a complete failure as a president
Our various levels of gov't have NO constitutional authority to prohibit mind altering substances. --- They do have the power to reasonably regulate dangerous substances.
Show me exactly where in the Constitution it is prohibited.
Our bill of rights and the 14th specify the regulatory powers granted by the people to gov'ts, and those that aren't. Prohibitions on booze, drugs, (or guns) isn't a granted power.