You quote the famous newspaper columnist Heywood Broun saying, “The 18th is the only Amendment that carries the death penalty.” Thousands of people died from alcohol poisoned by their own government, so why would the other histories leave it out?
I don’t know. These sorts of holy moral crusades are really dangerous. It’s not jihad, but it’s exactly the same kind of thinking. I’m right and the ends justify the means. The attitude was, ‘Oh well, they died. They were using an illegal product and they’re scum so it doesn’t matter.’ There were even eugenic arguments in favor of it
One of the points [made by New York’s medical examiner at the time] is that the people who drank this stuff were people with very little money and power. It wasn’t our image of Prohibition with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. If those [types of people] had died, it would have been a different story, but they had the money to avoid it.
How come no one sued?
The idea of going up against the government in court never seemed to cross anyone’s mind. I’m not sure when they started doing big class actions but this would have been [a huge one].
You could say we do the same thing today by putting acetaminophen (Tylenol), which can cause fatal liver damage, into many opioid painkillers, partly as an attempt to deter abusers.
I agree. I have people write me about it. They’ll send me email with scientific evidence of what the government is doing today in terms of putting things into drugs [that could harm or kill addicts].
It’s weird how both poisoners and poisons themselves work by betraying people’s trust.
A select number of compounds kill us because they take advantage of the way our bodies work naturally. A radioactive poison like radium is structured like calcium [so it gets into the bones]. This is the dark side of how chemicals move through our body. Drugs that help us take advantage of those same systems to bring things back to a normal healthy state. These chemicals don’t do that at all; they take advantage of everything that works to make us healthy and twist it so it works against us.
Poisons make our bodies betray us. They’re wicked chemistry. But sometimes understanding how these things work for evil also helps us understand how they can work for good.
See more of Healthland’s ‘Mind Reading’ series.
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.