The Deadly Mix of Government, Do Gooders, and the Moral High Ground

There is an excellent article by Deborah Blum in Slate describing how the US government in the 1920s poisoned its own citizens as part of Prohibition. I've bolded the key bit:

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.

...

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

...

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Go read the whole article. It is excellent. It shows how fanatical "do gooders" can be so blinded by their insane "morality" that they will go beyond any reasonable limit in their crusade to "fix" those they think need fixing. (And it shows how governments lose sight of the fact that they are servants of the people. Clearly if your government decides to kill you because you aren't doing what the government wants, it has lost sight of the real relationship: we hire government to organize us. Government's don't "hire" us.)

The above reminds me of the famous quote by Bertolt Brecht from his poem "Die Lösung" (The Solution) which was his commentary on the uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Sadly, too often the government figures it needs to "dissolve" the people, in this case, poison the people to teach them a "lesson".