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Speaker 1: Yeah, welcome to the show everyone. I'm Ben. No. Have

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Speaker 1: you ever seen a moonshine still kind of looks like

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Speaker 1: a glorified sort of fancy tea cattle kind of right. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it depends really on the parts that the bootleggers or

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Speaker 1: moonshiners are working with. The pretty common it's got a

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Speaker 1: curly cue part for distillation. They were more common during

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Speaker 1: the area of prohibition, but you can still see a

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Speaker 1: lot of old ones out in the mountains now, and

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Speaker 1: they would use any available part to make us still.

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Speaker 1: For instance, car carburetors were used in moonshine distillation operate sans,

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Speaker 1: often to the detriment of the people who ultimately drink

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Speaker 1: the shine. I wonder where that is. Yeah, what what

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Speaker 1: I'm saying here is that due to prohibition, uh, a

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Speaker 1: lot of quality control just took a dive. Wait a minute,

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Speaker 1: So you're saying that totally banning and outlawing a substance

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Speaker 1: doesn't just make people automatically magically stop wanting to consume

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Speaker 1: said substance. I know it sounds like a broad brush right,

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Speaker 1: but history has shown prohibition largely aside from any you know,

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Speaker 1: moral arguments, prohibition of a substance just doesn't work. Speak

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Speaker 1: of history, we have to give a shout out to

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Speaker 1: one of our favorite parts of the show, super producer

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Speaker 1: Casey Pegrom Casey Bootleg Pegrum Casey is history personified. Yes,

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Speaker 1: yes to some of what you just said, though, Ben,

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Speaker 1: the heart wants what the heart wants, sure, sure, and

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Speaker 1: Uncle Sam can't stop the heart from wanting. Right. Well

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Speaker 1: governed mints have very very little luck suppressing a chemical

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Speaker 1: substance of any sort, and alcohol is no different. Today's

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Speaker 1: story takes us to the world of prohibition, and I

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Speaker 1: think everybody across the planet is aware in some vague

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Speaker 1: way of the US is experiment with the Eighteenth Amendment

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Speaker 1: and the prohibition of alcohol. Right, do you think more

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Speaker 1: vaguely aware of that? I think they're vaguely aware of it.

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Speaker 1: But let's make them intimately aware of it, shall be sure? Sure? So.

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Speaker 1: The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, said the following the manufacturer, sale, or transportation

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Speaker 1: of intoxicating liquors, within the importation thereof into or the

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Speaker 1: exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory subject

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Speaker 1: to this jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes. So it prohibits

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Speaker 1: all of that, and it goes into effect on January seven,

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Speaker 1: seen ninety and people thought, the people who thought this

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Speaker 1: was a good idea, where like there's a brand new

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Speaker 1: America on the way. Yeah, I mean, there's no question

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Speaker 1: that it was kind of a puritanical way of looking

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Speaker 1: at things, and it was sort of this as slightly

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Speaker 1: misguided notion that getting rid of the devil's juice was

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Speaker 1: gonna all of a sudden make everyone into good people.

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Speaker 1: Getting rid of Lucifer Sippens would make people inherently better

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Speaker 1: and prevent the dissolution of the nation's moral character. And

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Speaker 1: they would they would paint pictures of rampant crime, duke joints,

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Speaker 1: I don't know if they use the phrase juke joints

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Speaker 1: at that point, uh, and alcoholism. They said, we will

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Speaker 1: increase the success of our economy, we will raise the

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Speaker 1: moral character of the nation, and will make the innocent

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Speaker 1: people of the country safe again. Because we were also

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Speaker 1: just getting out of a war, and there was a

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Speaker 1: sense that society may well be on the brink of

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Speaker 1: of utter chaos. So you know, let's let's let's get

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Speaker 1: rid of people's thing that kind of makes them feel better, right, right,

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Speaker 1: Because I'm not trying to advocate for using alcohol to

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Speaker 1: number yourself against the pains of the world. But man,

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Speaker 1: the world was fullest in pain. Around this time. Things

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Speaker 1: were pretty rough, a lot of poverty and a lot

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Speaker 1: of divide between classes, and the topic of today's story

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Speaker 1: specifically affects the lower classes almost exclusively. Yeah, this is

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Speaker 1: a story of victimization and socioeconomic divides. It's also a

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Speaker 1: story where in Uncle Sam is probably the bad guy,

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Speaker 1: the closest thing we have in to to an antagonist, right,

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Speaker 1: Uncle Sam is such a jerk. So here we are

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Speaker 1: in prohibition. We found this excellent article on vox. I

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Speaker 1: don't know if we should do the title yet because

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Speaker 1: it might be a little bit of a spoiler by

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Speaker 1: German Lopez. So in this article, Deborah Bloom, the author

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Speaker 1: of the Poisoner's handbook Murder in the Birth of Forensic

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Speaker 1: Medicine in jazz Age, New York, explains how even before Prohibition,

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Speaker 1: the government had some particular requirements for industrial alcohol manufacturers. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is pretty cool. Um, it was actually um a

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Speaker 1: regulation that required these additives to make this industrial alcohol unpotable,

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Speaker 1: but it also separated them from the potable alcohols, which

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Speaker 1: were taxed differently. So um, I think originally it was

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Speaker 1: just an additive called methanol, which is a wood alcohol

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Speaker 1: that is, you know, in certain doses, toxic when consumed

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Speaker 1: by humans. Sure, yeah, absolutely, And we see I think

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Speaker 1: you did a great job outlining this. We see a

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Speaker 1: couple of concurrent motivations for this. Right, let's make sure

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Speaker 1: that we still get paid and we can separate the

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Speaker 1: different types of alcohol. But as prohibition was enacted and continued,

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Speaker 1: first off, the people who argued in favor for prohibition

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Speaker 1: were completely wrong. At least in this case, the economy

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Speaker 1: was not helped in any shape, fashion or form. I'm

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Speaker 1: sure law enforcement received some more money as they were

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Speaker 1: trying this impossible war on drugs mission, but the moral

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Speaker 1: character didn't exactly improve either because people kept drinking. Well,

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Speaker 1: not only did it not improve, it just kind of

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Speaker 1: fed the monster that is organized crime and all of

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Speaker 1: these underground distilleries and speakeasies and just pure outright thievery.

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Speaker 1: Because that industrial alcohol we were talking about, that was

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Speaker 1: the stuff he needed to make the bootleg booze. So,

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Speaker 1: you know, people were actively pulling off heists to get

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Speaker 1: this stuff. Um. And here's the thing that's so cool, Ben,

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Speaker 1: this is something I didn't know. They call this this

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Speaker 1: how because today's episode the Chemist's War, and it's for

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Speaker 1: good reason. It's because the methanol that was in that

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Speaker 1: industrial alcohol could actually be slightly removed or it could

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Speaker 1: be like redistilled, mitigated. And so that's what the chemists

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Speaker 1: that the bootleggers or the gangsters hired we're doing. And

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Speaker 1: obviously they would pay their chemists way better than the

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Speaker 1: government chemists, so they might attract better talent. Yeah. Absolutely,

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Speaker 1: And we know there was this huge industry of illegal

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Speaker 1: alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale. It booms very very quickly

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Speaker 1: after prohibition. And what we find is kind of this

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Speaker 1: proto breaking bad situation. This really is a chemist war.

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Speaker 1: In an essay written in the twenties called Our Essay

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Speaker 1: and Extermination by a doctor named Charles Norris, who was

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Speaker 1: a chief Medical Examiner of New York City at the time,

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Speaker 1: he details the size of this trade. He says the

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Speaker 1: federal government admits that while eighty million gallons of grain

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Speaker 1: alcohol are manufactured yearly under permit, only about seventy million

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Speaker 1: gallons of it turn up again in legally manufactured products.

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Speaker 1: That means ten million gallons estimated per year are being

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Speaker 1: taken by these groups of gangsters, handed to their like

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Speaker 1: evil wizard chemists, and they're cleaning it out or making

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Speaker 1: it less lethal hopefully, and then they're selling it, you know,

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Speaker 1: in the back rooms a speakeasies across the nation. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I said think too, Like if you were just

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Speaker 1: an average workaday Joe trying to get your boozefix on

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Speaker 1: going one of these speakeasies, you didn't know where it

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Speaker 1: was coming from. You didn't you didn't know what the

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Speaker 1: it's like buying illegal street drugs today, Like you know,

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Speaker 1: you have no idea what additives or impurities are in it.

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Speaker 1: You are trusting in your supplier to not kill you. Right,

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Speaker 1: And even before the craziness it's loose that we're about

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Speaker 1: to get into, people were dying from alcohol poisoning because

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Speaker 1: sometimes those cameras didn't do a good enough job of

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Speaker 1: getting this stuff out of there, and it was always

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Speaker 1: impure even if they did do a decent job. Absolutely, absolutely,

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Speaker 1: And when we say the effective people's health, we're talking

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Speaker 1: about very dark stuff. People died, people encountered paralysis. You

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Speaker 1: know that old trope about drinking moonshine and going blind.

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Speaker 1: Some people did go blind, not not a whole ton,

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Speaker 1: but we have some. We have some spooky numbers for you. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's crazy that I found this, this article or a

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Speaker 1: blog post about something called ginger Jake. Ginger Jake was

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Speaker 1: a medicine. It was actually got around prohibition because it

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Speaker 1: was sold as a medicine and it had something in

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Speaker 1: it called tri crescal phosphate that actually helped kind of

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Speaker 1: trick the government's tests into you know, seeing it as

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Speaker 1: being a pure alcohol or you know, having no medicinal

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Speaker 1: value whatsoever. But essentially it was just ginger flavored um alcohol.

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Speaker 1: But apparently this additive they used, unbeknownst to the company,

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Speaker 1: I imagine, was a very very slow acting neurotoxin, so

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Speaker 1: it took time for it to take hold, and then

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Speaker 1: eventually it actually started to cause all kinds of leg

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Speaker 1: muscular pains and weakness, and it caused a type of paralysis.

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Speaker 1: According to this uh, this post um would actually have

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Speaker 1: a very distinctive walk associated it with it, where people

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Speaker 1: would have to like lift their legs up entirely, sort

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Speaker 1: of like the the Ministry of Silly Walks from the

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Speaker 1: Monty Python Show, you know, the Jake Walk, the Jake

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Speaker 1: Walk exactly. We actually have a song. The interesting thing

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Speaker 1: about this is it was apparently baffling to doctors and

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Speaker 1: toxicologists um in the US, but it was actually a

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Speaker 1: couple of blues singers who identified the source of this

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Speaker 1: in two different songs won by isham Bracy called Jake

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Speaker 1: Liquor Blues. Heret clip of that, I drank so much money.

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Speaker 1: I thank much money money I had I made it.

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Speaker 1: And then we also have Tommy Johnson who kind of

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Speaker 1: figured out the source of this condition in his song

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Speaker 1: alcohol and Jake Blues. When do a clip of that, Yes,

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Speaker 1: please good I do loing me that Bart good Man.

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Speaker 1: So they're part They're not neurologist obviously, but they are

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Speaker 1: part of the community where the people encounter this stuff

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Speaker 1: on a regular basis. That's right, Because you know, the rich,

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Speaker 1: the swells, the high society types, who weren't these kind

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Speaker 1: of Bible thumping prohibition pushers, they were able to get

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Speaker 1: imported booze from places like Europe or the Caribbean. You

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Speaker 1: can get rum very expensive. You had to know people,

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Speaker 1: but it could be done. But the lower class had

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Speaker 1: to rely on this super cheap, dangerous street bootleg stuff, right. Absolutely.

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Speaker 1: People would also buy things that were counterfeit spirits. They

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Speaker 1: were advertised perhaps as whiskey, or they were advertised as vodka,

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Speaker 1: but instead they were you know, they were tarted up

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Speaker 1: industrial alcohol products, and they contained a lot of terrible stuff,

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Speaker 1: not not just the neurotoxins, which this this is a

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Speaker 1: really interesting story about Jake. I think they didn't figure

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Speaker 1: out the neurological damage it's capable of until what the seventies, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I think it was even worse than they originally

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Speaker 1: have even thought. It turns out that it actually damaged

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Speaker 1: the movement control neurons in the brain or the upper

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Speaker 1: motor neurons. And thankfully, you know, this is this is

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Speaker 1: about fifty years later. Um, but they had of course

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Speaker 1: tracked down all of the offending stuff and it was

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Speaker 1: outlawed and gone. But this is this is interesting. This

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Speaker 1: is a company that's doing this. This is a company

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Speaker 1: that's trying to make a buck by cheating the system

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Speaker 1: during prohibition, right right, And they're not the only one.

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Speaker 1: This also affects pharmacies. They were allowed to dispense whiskey

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Speaker 1: with a prescription, so who runs the prescription pad? Right? Yeah?

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Speaker 1: And religious authorities that required or i should say institutions.

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Speaker 1: Religious institutions that required alcohol for ceremonies also came under

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Speaker 1: the control of criminal organizations. And it was it's similar

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Speaker 1: to uh, how when marijuana was legalized or decriminalized medically

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Speaker 1: first in California, a lot of people developed nebulous medical

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Speaker 1: conditions so they could get their prescriptions a hard time sleeping.

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Speaker 1: Are you got you know, restless leg syndrome or something?

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Speaker 1: And there were a lot more people claiming to be

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Speaker 1: adherents of certain churches or religious organizations. People found Jesus,

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Speaker 1: are you saying al Capone was running communion one? My man? Uh?

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Speaker 1: People like him were involved for sure. Uh. And this

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Speaker 1: this was helpful because these were sources of alcohol that

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Speaker 1: was less likely to be contaminated. But while this was happening,

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Speaker 1: the government realized that all the predictions they had made

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Speaker 1: were wrong. Turned out alcoholism and health problems due to

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Speaker 1: alcoholic consumption. We're not going down, were going up, right,

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Speaker 1: Like alcohol declined a little bit, but a ton of

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Speaker 1: restaurants closed because, as you know, many restaurants make their

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Speaker 1: largest amount of profit off of spirit sales. And then

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Speaker 1: right right because of the markup, and then the government

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Speaker 1: figured out that there was a massive leak they could

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Speaker 1: not plug somewhere along the production line of industrial alcohol

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Speaker 1: manufacturer and legal use, like millions of gallons were disappearing,

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Speaker 1: and so they made a pretty brutal, ruthless decision. It

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Speaker 1: really did ben So earlier we alluded to the chemist's

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Speaker 1: war during Prohibition, and I would argue that's something that

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Speaker 1: was kind of ongoing even before this brutal move we're

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Speaker 1: about to talk about. But it really kicked in the

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Speaker 1: high gear when the US government decided to require these

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Speaker 1: industries manufacturers of this industrial alcohol to start adding all

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Speaker 1: kinds of horrible stuff to their product. And I guess,

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Speaker 1: to the government's credit, that's not really the right way

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Speaker 1: to put it at all. But they were transparent about it.

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Speaker 1: They wanted people to know. It was in the papers.

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Speaker 1: In fact, in this Vox article, the headline from a

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Speaker 1: clipping reads government to double alcohol poison content and also

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Speaker 1: add benzene smell warrens drinkers. So, uh, they knew what

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Speaker 1: people are doing. They wanted them to know, we're going

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Speaker 1: to make this stuff even more poison than it already is.

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Speaker 1: And the assumption there was that people were gonna look

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Speaker 1: out have some sort of self preservation instinct, not the case.

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Speaker 1: People already were showing that they lacked that entirely when

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Speaker 1: they were drinking this stuff off the streets that was

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Speaker 1: already very, very dangerous and adulterated. Yeah, this was in

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Speaker 1: and as you say, old, to their credit, they were

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Speaker 1: very public about this. But the reason we call this

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Speaker 1: a brutal, ruthless thing is that it was clearly an indefensible,

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Speaker 1: illogical statement. It was both trying to punish people for

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Speaker 1: a moral decision and then also remove any perceived culpability

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Speaker 1: from the inevitable consequences of this terrible decision. Yeah, they

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Speaker 1: put benzine in there. They also put mercury in there.

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Speaker 1: I think a candid stryct nine I believe um. But

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Speaker 1: the biggest one was that they like doubled that methanol

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Speaker 1: that was in there. And the reason that that one

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Speaker 1: was the doozy is because it was so similar to

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Speaker 1: the alcohol itself atomically that it bond bonded with it

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Speaker 1: in a way that was very difficult for the chemist

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Speaker 1: to fully get rid of it by re distilling it

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Speaker 1: or whatever. I'm not you know, I'm not an alcohol chemist,

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Speaker 1: but whatever they went through to do it was hard, yeah,

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Speaker 1: because it was so closely intertwined with with the drinking alcohol. Right.

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Speaker 1: And Charles Norris, who we mentioned earlier in that essay,

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Speaker 1: he and Alexander Getler, who was the chief toxicologist of

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Speaker 1: New York at the time, they both told the government

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Speaker 1: not to do it. The government did it, and instantly

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Speaker 1: people started dying. It was called this was called the

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Speaker 1: alcohol of the Country by Bloom because it was very

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Speaker 1: easily accessible stuff. We have a lot of information about

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Speaker 1: this in New York City especially, but we know that

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Speaker 1: at this time bootleggers had nationwide transit infrastructure, so this

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Speaker 1: stuff was going everywhere. And the estimates for the deaths

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Speaker 1: are a little bit fuzzy because some of the deaths

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Speaker 1: were were just the result of alcoholism. But the problem

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Speaker 1: is that at the time alcoholism like drinking oneself to

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Speaker 1: death from regular old alcohol that was listed as a

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Speaker 1: natural death in obituaries. This was something very different. This

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Speaker 1: was death by poison. Yeah, And this guy, Charles Norris,

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Speaker 1: who you read from his essay earlier, who was the

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Speaker 1: chief medical Examiner in New York City, was just wholesale

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Speaker 1: against this. He's like, this is a really bad idea. Government,

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Speaker 1: please don't do this. And of course they didn't listen

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Speaker 1: to him, and so he he referred to this and

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Speaker 1: actually ties in with the title of that essay. He

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Speaker 1: referred to this as quote our national experiment in extermination.

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Speaker 1: So it's I mean, it really is almost like this

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Speaker 1: idea of like they called him souss, you know, the

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Speaker 1: drunks or whatever. They almost it's almost like the government

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Speaker 1: actively wanted to kill them. Um. And in this uh,

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Speaker 1: in this Slate article, it describes an event that happened

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Speaker 1: on Christmas Eve of nineteen when a and goes into

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Speaker 1: Bellevue Hospital, New York and is terrified that Santa Claus

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Speaker 1: is coming after him to kill him with a baseball bat.

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Speaker 1: As it turns out, he was in fact experiencing hallucination

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Speaker 1: as a result of this poisonous stuff. And again, you know,

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Speaker 1: the government knew I mean, I don't know. It just

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Speaker 1: seems like soil informed Like obviously prohibition wasn't working. They

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Speaker 1: knew prohibition wasn't working. They wanted to up the ante

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Speaker 1: by doing this, But did they really think this was

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Speaker 1: gonna stop people? They had to know people were going

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Speaker 1: to drink it. The approach they appear to have taken here,

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Speaker 1: or rather the stants, would be that you have to

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Speaker 1: break a few drunk eggs to make a sober omelet,

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Speaker 1: or the dangerous argument we've talked about before, the belief

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Speaker 1: in the greater good. But yeah, almost a hundred people died,

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Speaker 1: as you said, in December, the week of Christmas due

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Speaker 1: to this same year that the government passed these regulations,

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Speaker 1: and hundreds would die in the following years. This had

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Speaker 1: intentionally been rendered fatal, and Calvin Coolidge was the president

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Speaker 1: at the time, and under his administration, these deaths were

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Speaker 1: not seen as a problem. It was kind of like shrug.

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Speaker 1: Things happen, but overall is getting drunks off the streets? Well,

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Speaker 1: it's sort of like the is it the president of

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Speaker 1: UM the Philippines who basically advocates for murdering drug dealers

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Speaker 1: in the streets? Similar vibe, only a little more roundabout

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Speaker 1: way of doing it. I mean, at least the tertas

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Speaker 1: says what he means and isn't trying to hide behind

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Speaker 1: some kind of puritanical curtain like these guys. You know,

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Speaker 1: it's it's it's very, very troubling. Norris is walking a

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Speaker 1: thin line on this prohibition issue at the time, you know,

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Speaker 1: because he is the chief Medical Examiner, so he has

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Speaker 1: street cred and he's, I think, get a little bit

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Speaker 1: of a safer place to argue against prohibition. And he

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Speaker 1: says that something must be added to grain alcohol to

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Speaker 1: prevent it being all drunk away and thereby denied to

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Speaker 1: legitimate industry and business. So he says, okay, we have

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Speaker 1: to add some kind of contaminate but method all seriously,

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Speaker 1: that's going to kill people. He didn't really propose a

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Speaker 1: different additive, or I couldn't find a different additive that

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Speaker 1: he proposed. But he also he also mentioned something that

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Speaker 1: was really powerful and pressing it for his time. He

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Speaker 1: revealed how the New York administration of the twenties looked

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Speaker 1: at certain populations as disposable alcoholics, certain types of immigrants,

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Speaker 1: the poor, as we mentioned at the top of this episode,

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Speaker 1: and there were a couple of different rules, like two

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Speaker 1: sets of rules, one for the wealthy people who are

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Speaker 1: drinking a lot and one for the quote unquote degenerates

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Speaker 1: and norse points out that private physicians will rarely expose

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Speaker 1: their deceased customers to the indignity of a post mortem examination,

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Speaker 1: and then they'll just call those deaths, those alcohol related

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Speaker 1: deaths death by some sort of natural cause. They still

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Speaker 1: look upright and respectable even in the afterlife. Yeah, Ben,

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Speaker 1: and I think there's this this quote from the Chicago

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Speaker 1: Tribune that was cited in the slave article. Um, it

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Speaker 1: really sums up this whole problem that we're trying to

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Speaker 1: kind of wrap our heads around from says quote. Normally,

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Speaker 1: no American government would engage in such business as poisoning

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Speaker 1: its own citizens. Um. It is only in the curious

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Speaker 1: fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified. So,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I think that really sums up the mindset

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Speaker 1: of like this whole era some moral crusade, total moral

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Speaker 1: crusade that did eventually come to an end. Yes, luckily

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Speaker 1: luckily for everyone involved. Teetotaler and uh booze enthusiasts a like.

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Speaker 1: Prohibition of alcohol was repealed in nineteen thirty three, so

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Speaker 1: it didn't last that long, just a span of about

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Speaker 1: thirteen ridiculous years. Now were there were there pluses to

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Speaker 1: alcohol prohibition? Uh? Sure, for certain parties, it was great

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Speaker 1: for organized crime, right it was. It was great for

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Speaker 1: law enforcement, that's job security because it's an unending war.

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Speaker 1: But for the majority of the country it was demonstrably

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Speaker 1: a bad thing. Yeah, sure sounds like it to me,

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Speaker 1: But I don't really see too much of a silver

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Speaker 1: lining here. So, and it's interesting the way we're seeing

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Speaker 1: this kind of repeat with marijuana prohibition and the way

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Speaker 1: the tide is turning with that. It's really interesting to

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Speaker 1: kind of be quite a time to be alive, just

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Speaker 1: to see these things kind of change and see that

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Speaker 1: kind of puritanical attitudes kind of making their way out

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Speaker 1: of fashion. Yeah, which is strange to be because in

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Speaker 1: the current situation regarding marijuana, especially in the US, there's

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Speaker 1: some states where it's completely legal and there are some

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Speaker 1: states where it's still a very serious offense to what

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Speaker 1: possess it, uh carried around, grow it. And one of

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Speaker 1: the huge factors in the turning tide regarding marijuana legislation

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Speaker 1: has honestly been not so much the science behind the

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Speaker 1: substance itself, but the economic benefit to governments and businesses

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Speaker 1: of making it legal, for sure. I mean that's certainly

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Speaker 1: you see dollar signs and some of these formerly teetotal

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Speaker 1: in officials, right, um and yeah, and you would think that, um,

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Speaker 1: with with all this concern about the economy, with this

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Speaker 1: original prohibition, that would have been a little bit more

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Speaker 1: on people's minds instead of just funneling all that money

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Speaker 1: into the abyss that is the black market, you know,

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Speaker 1: right right, and after after prohibition on alcohol hall ended

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Speaker 1: on the federal level in December five of thirty three,

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Speaker 1: some states decided to stay dry states for up to

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Speaker 1: a third of a century longer. We still have dry

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Speaker 1: counties in in in the U. S. I know, uh,

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Speaker 1: Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is a really beautiful mountain cabins

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Speaker 1: you can rent there. That is a dry county. Oh

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Speaker 1: I didn't do that. Yeah, and it's interesting too. I

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Speaker 1: want to point out this something that I noticed as

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Speaker 1: a correction in one of these articles. I think it

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Speaker 1: was in the Slate article. Um, they mischaracterized the eighteenth

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Speaker 1: Amendment as prohibiting the consumption of alcohol that was not illegal. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was just the manufacturing, manufacturing, and distribution, right import exports.

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Speaker 1: Just an interesting distinction there. Yeah, yeah right, it's kind

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Speaker 1: of like the pursuit of happiness. You can go after it.

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Speaker 1: Uh yeah. Currently, as we record here in the US,

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Speaker 1: there are still hundreds of dry counties across the country.

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Speaker 1: About ten percent of the country is still what would

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Speaker 1: be considered or dry, and about eighteen million people are

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Speaker 1: so live live in that area. Nobody knows how dry

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Speaker 1: I am, Ben, No one knows the dryness you've seen,

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Speaker 1: isn't it weird? Though? You always see drunk people singing

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Speaker 1: that song I'm talking about like cartoons. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: nobody dry. Yeah, don't store yourself, sir. And on that note,

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Speaker 1: feel free to send us your favorite drunken single longs

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00:27:45,840 --> 00:27:48,800
Speaker 1: if you find them online. We want to thank you

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00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:53,400
Speaker 1: so much for taking this strange journey with us. If

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00:27:53,400 --> 00:27:56,600
Speaker 1: you would like to learn more, we can recommend reading

408
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Speaker 1: Charles Norris's essay and Extermination in full. Deborah Blooms. Poisoner's

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Speaker 1: Handbook is a great thing, and it's not just about prohibition.

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Speaker 1: If you liked our arsenic episode, you'll also love Poisoner's

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Speaker 1: Handbook absolutely um And we would of course like to

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Speaker 1: thank our super producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams who composed

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Speaker 1: our theme, our research associate Christopher Haciotas, who hipped us

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Speaker 1: to today's topic. And I want to thank you right well, Ben,

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Speaker 1: I'm looking at you. Oh and thank you NOL. See

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Speaker 1: you next time,