Cool USA Facts!

In the late 1920s, during prohibition, the US treasury department, under orders from Calvin Coolidge's government, intentionally poisoned alcohol supplies leading to the deaths of at least 700 people, with thousands more suffering from alcohol poisoning from methyl alcohol. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," said New York City medical examiner Charles Norris, "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. 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." Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff." The program was finally ended in 1933. 1