The Government is our enemy! Here is an example why » Fast and Furious, the Very Early Years

The government figured people were drinking too much during prohibition, so it decided it could reduce alcohol consumption by poisoning in the alcohol. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." m/r

Ed Driscoll » Fast and Furious, the Very Early Years

By Ed Driscoll On December 26, 2012  In Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal,Liberal Fascism,The Future and its Enemies,The Memory Hole,The Return of the Primitive -Full short post-

“The Chemist’s War: The little-told* story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences:”

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.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” 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.

I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. “I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?” I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

I did, however, remember the U.S. government’s controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they’d brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn’t really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.

Fortunately, in these more enlightened times, the government wouldn’t deliberately risk killing innocent people to further a goal that self-described “Progressives” have long championed, would they? Oh wait…
* Yes, it’s true that everything the average person knows about the last 100 years is probably wrong. But why is this anecdote such a little-told story?
(Via Instapundit.)