Cops Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, who shuttered many a NYC speakeasy during Prohibition, enjoy a drink in 1935.

I just read “The Chemist’s War,” a really interesting article by Deborah Blum on Slate, which recalls how the U.S. Government killed roughly 10,000 Americans during Prohibition. Flummoxed by a complete disregard for anti-alcohol laws, the Feds created a program that poisoned alcohol to try to curtail drinking. An excerpt from the article:

“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.”