As the story goes, the U.S. government added lethal chemicals into liquor in order to kill anyone who drank it. This would not only scare people into giving up drinking, but also give the government more power to control the selling of illegal alcohol. So widespread was this insidious practice that it was rumored that 10,000 people died from consuming tainted alcohol. Is such a claim true or an infamous urban legend?
According to Snopes, the story is false — at least, a part of it is. While Snopes claims that the government never purposefully sold tainted alcohol to its people, there was actually some encouragement to do so. The addition of adding lethal chemicals to alcohol was not meant to kill anyone (unless they drank it willingly, of course) but instead to make the alcohol undrinkable, thus destroying the supply of a gangster’s stash. The claim that 10,000 people died from alcohol poisoning may be true, but this was mainly due to people consuming poorly-distilled alcohol sold by amateur brewers.
Slate, however, isn’t so lenient with the government. They report that such a claim is similar to the United States government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with herbicide in the 1970s, implying that the government may not have been too afraid to use a similar tactic on its own people.
While the FBI refutes that it had ever been involved in purposefully poisoning American citizens, it seems there are some who still carry doubt.
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