Crocodile Bites, Jake Leg Blues and Man-Eating Cocaine
Will Rogers once remarked "Governments used to murder by the bullet only. Now it's by the quart.", on the subject of Prohibition. Prohibition of alcohol was a costly, messy, awful mistake, and was responsible for thousands of deaths, as well as the rise of the Mafia in the US. I mean, none of this is controversial stuff, except possibly in parts of Utah. People acknowledge that it didn't work, in any way. Except people who got rich by bootlegging or moonshining. Anyway. Aside from some vague jokes about bathtub gin and checking to see if you went blind, what a lot of people are not fully aware of is the adulteration that went on in the rotgut available to the average person, as opposed to the romantically smuggled genuine stuff well-off jazz babies were drinking.
Wood alcohol was the most common, being ridiculously cheap, easy to make, tasted like grain alcohol and potent enough to spike a lot of fake booze. Well, potent in that it turned into formic acid, mostly in the brain. Down in the Bowery in NYC, you could get a "cocktail" called Smoke, which was straight methyl alcohol and water, for fifteen cents a glass. Unsurprisingly, deaths from Smoke alone in the Bowery averaged one a day.
That wasn't the only poison in the drinks, though. By the mid-20s, the government ordered the industrial alcohol that was still sold to be further poisoned, claiming it would reduce the numbers of people drinking it. Carbolic acid, benzene, mercury salts, chloroform, brucine (a strychnine relative), and such did slightly lower the number of people drinking it, though mostly just in the sense that they kept dying or ending up in alcoholic wards in hospitals.
Jamaican ginger was a patent medicine of the 19th century that was mostly just popular as a means of getting around Prohibition. Well, it was until the government cracked down on it. But some enterprising chemists and dealers found a way to get past the Prohibition agents' tests, and were back in business. All with the magic of tricresyl phosphate. It wasn't long until the paralysis cases started showing up at hospitals. And until blues singers started writing songs about it.
The Federal government's position was that the dead, blinded, poisoned and paralyzed drinkers knew what they were doing, and deserved it. A position pretty much on par with much modern policy.
Fast-forward to now. We're still, generally, as a society in the business of prohibition. And look how great it's going! Cartels are still making mad bank, narco-lords have even the police running scared, organized crime is doing fine, and addicted people are incarcerated at astonishing levels. And people are still being poisoned and told it's their fault.
In parts of Russia and the Ukraine now (though a few cases have reportedly shown up in Canada), heroin addiction is pretty rampant, because of poverty, and the main heroin trafficking roads being through the area. However, access to heroin, especially outside of wealthier major cities is extremely patchy. Enter homemade desomorphine, better known as krokodil. It gets its name from the fact that the unrefined mix of codeine pills, red phosphorus, iodine, kerosine and other similarly healthy ingredients will actually eat off your flesh. Despite the obvious horror and suffering, many of the people using it are simply allowed to die (which does happen quite quickly) because, as is generally the case with the very poor and the very addicted in any population, they've already been written off and rendered less than human.
These aren't isolated horrors. Up to 80% of the cocaine sold in the US is cut with a veterinary deworming drug which can cause an immune reaction leading to lethal flesh-eating infections. And then we get to the "bath salts", substituted cathinones which have already caused people to die, as has the synthetic weed sold as incense.
It's not the wealthy, or the elites who are suffering and dying from these poisoned, adulterated, or simply inherently toxic drugs any more than the ultra-wealthy were at risk of jake leg during Prohibition. These drugs are, without a doubt, vastly more dangerous than what they were devised to imitate, adulterate, or otherwise get around the law with. The underclasses have been written off as expected casualty of a dangerous, costly, bloody, and fundamentally needless war.
*tip of the hat goes to Deborah Blum, whose The Poisoner's Handbook is a fantastic read*
Wood alcohol was the most common, being ridiculously cheap, easy to make, tasted like grain alcohol and potent enough to spike a lot of fake booze. Well, potent in that it turned into formic acid, mostly in the brain. Down in the Bowery in NYC, you could get a "cocktail" called Smoke, which was straight methyl alcohol and water, for fifteen cents a glass. Unsurprisingly, deaths from Smoke alone in the Bowery averaged one a day.
That wasn't the only poison in the drinks, though. By the mid-20s, the government ordered the industrial alcohol that was still sold to be further poisoned, claiming it would reduce the numbers of people drinking it. Carbolic acid, benzene, mercury salts, chloroform, brucine (a strychnine relative), and such did slightly lower the number of people drinking it, though mostly just in the sense that they kept dying or ending up in alcoholic wards in hospitals.
Jamaican ginger was a patent medicine of the 19th century that was mostly just popular as a means of getting around Prohibition. Well, it was until the government cracked down on it. But some enterprising chemists and dealers found a way to get past the Prohibition agents' tests, and were back in business. All with the magic of tricresyl phosphate. It wasn't long until the paralysis cases started showing up at hospitals. And until blues singers started writing songs about it.
The Federal government's position was that the dead, blinded, poisoned and paralyzed drinkers knew what they were doing, and deserved it. A position pretty much on par with much modern policy.
Fast-forward to now. We're still, generally, as a society in the business of prohibition. And look how great it's going! Cartels are still making mad bank, narco-lords have even the police running scared, organized crime is doing fine, and addicted people are incarcerated at astonishing levels. And people are still being poisoned and told it's their fault.
In parts of Russia and the Ukraine now (though a few cases have reportedly shown up in Canada), heroin addiction is pretty rampant, because of poverty, and the main heroin trafficking roads being through the area. However, access to heroin, especially outside of wealthier major cities is extremely patchy. Enter homemade desomorphine, better known as krokodil. It gets its name from the fact that the unrefined mix of codeine pills, red phosphorus, iodine, kerosine and other similarly healthy ingredients will actually eat off your flesh. Despite the obvious horror and suffering, many of the people using it are simply allowed to die (which does happen quite quickly) because, as is generally the case with the very poor and the very addicted in any population, they've already been written off and rendered less than human.
These aren't isolated horrors. Up to 80% of the cocaine sold in the US is cut with a veterinary deworming drug which can cause an immune reaction leading to lethal flesh-eating infections. And then we get to the "bath salts", substituted cathinones which have already caused people to die, as has the synthetic weed sold as incense.
It's not the wealthy, or the elites who are suffering and dying from these poisoned, adulterated, or simply inherently toxic drugs any more than the ultra-wealthy were at risk of jake leg during Prohibition. These drugs are, without a doubt, vastly more dangerous than what they were devised to imitate, adulterate, or otherwise get around the law with. The underclasses have been written off as expected casualty of a dangerous, costly, bloody, and fundamentally needless war.
*tip of the hat goes to Deborah Blum, whose The Poisoner's Handbook is a fantastic read*