Speaker 1: Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we are returning to you with a
Speaker 1: classic episode.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Look, Nolan and I did use to party. Uh we
Speaker 1: don't party as much anymore, but we are we do.
Speaker 3: We like our booze non poisoned. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Tell us about this one.
Speaker 4: Oh man, I remember that time that the government, the
Speaker 4: federal government tried to poison people to keep them from
Speaker 4: drinking alcohol.
Speaker 3: That was a good one, man. How that work out?
Speaker 1: We'll see in this classic episode.
Speaker 3: Let's roll it.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: show everyone, I'm Ben Nol. Have you ever seen a
Speaker 1: moonshine still kind of.
Speaker 3: Looks like a glorified sort of fancy teakettle kind of right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it depends really on the parts that the bootleggers
Speaker 1: or moonshiners are working with. They're pretty common. It's got
Speaker 1: a curly cue part for distillation. They were more common
Speaker 1: during the area of prohibition, but you can still see
Speaker 1: a lot of old ones out in the mountains now.
Speaker 1: They would use any available part to make us still.
Speaker 1: For instance, car carburetors were used in moonshine distillation operations,
Speaker 1: often to the detriment of the people who ultimately drank
Speaker 1: the shine.
Speaker 3: I wonder where that is. Yeah, what I'm.
Speaker 1: Saying here is that due to prohibition, a lot of
Speaker 1: quality control just took a dive.
Speaker 4: Wait a minute, So you're saying that totally ban and
Speaker 4: outlawing a substance doesn't just make people automatically magically stop
Speaker 4: wanting to consume said substance.
Speaker 1: I know it sounds like a broad brush, right, but
Speaker 1: history has shown prohibition largely aside from any you know,
Speaker 1: moral arguments, prohibition of a substance just doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Speak of history, we.
Speaker 1: Have to give a shout out to one of our
Speaker 1: favorite parts of the show, super producer Casey pegram Casey.
Speaker 3: Bootleg pegram Casey is history personified.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah to someone what you just said, though, Ben,
Speaker 4: the heart wants what the heart wants.
Speaker 3: Sure, sure, and Uncle Sam can't stop the heart from wanting. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, governments have very very little luck suppressing a chemical
Speaker 1: substance of any sort, and alcohol is no different. Today's
Speaker 1: story takes us to the world of prohibition, and I
Speaker 1: think everybody across the planet and it is aware in
Speaker 1: some vague way of the US's experiment with the Eighteenth
Speaker 1: Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol. Right, people are vaguely
Speaker 1: aware of that.
Speaker 4: I think they're vaguely aware of it. But let's make
Speaker 4: them intimately aware of it, shall we?
Speaker 3: Ben sure? Sure?
Speaker 1: So the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified
Speaker 1: in nineteen nineteen, said the following the manufacturer, sale, or
Speaker 1: transportation of intoxicating liquors, within the importation thereof into or
Speaker 1: the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory
Speaker 1: subject to this jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes. So it
Speaker 1: prohibits all of that, and it goes into effect on
Speaker 1: January seventeenth, nineteen twenty, and people thought the people who
Speaker 1: thought this was a good idea were like, there's a
Speaker 1: brand new America on the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's no question that it was kind of
Speaker 4: a puritanical way of looking at things, And it was
Speaker 4: sort of this slightly misguided notion that getting rid of
Speaker 4: the devil's juice was going to all of a sudden
Speaker 4: make everyone into good people.
Speaker 1: Getting rid of Lucifer's sippons would make people inherently better
Speaker 1: and prevent the dissolution of the nation's moral character and
Speaker 1: they would paint pictures of rampant crime, juke joints. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they use the phrase juke joints at
Speaker 1: that point, and alcoholism. They said, we will increase the
Speaker 1: success of our economy, we will raise the moral character
Speaker 1: of the nation, and will make the innocent people of
Speaker 1: the country safe again.
Speaker 4: Because we were also just getting out of a war,
Speaker 4: and there was a sense that society may well be
Speaker 4: on the brink of utter chaos. So you know, let's
Speaker 4: let's get rid of people's thing that kind of makes
Speaker 4: them feel better, right, right, So I'm not trying to
Speaker 4: advocate for using alcoholic to numb yourself against the pains
Speaker 4: of the world, but man, the world was full of
Speaker 4: some pain around this time.
Speaker 3: Things were pretty rough.
Speaker 4: A lot of poverty and a lot of divide between classes,
Speaker 4: and the topic of today's story specifically affects the lower
Speaker 4: classes almost exclusively.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a story of victimization and socioeconomic divides.
Speaker 1: It's also a story wherein Uncle Sam is probably the
Speaker 1: bad guy, the closest thing we have and to an antagonist.
Speaker 3: Right, uncle Sam is such a jerk.
Speaker 1: So here we are in prohibition. We found this excellent
Speaker 1: article on Vox. I don't know if we should do
Speaker 1: the title yet because it might be a little bit
Speaker 1: of a spoiler by German Lopez. So in this article,
Speaker 1: Deborah Bloom, the author of the Poisoner's Handbook, Murdering the
Speaker 1: Birth of forensic Medicine and jazz Age New York, explains
Speaker 1: how even before Prohibition, the government had some particular requirements
Speaker 1: for industrial alcohol manufacturers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is pretty cool.
Speaker 4: It was actually a regulation that required these additives to
Speaker 4: make this industrial alcohol unpotable, but it also separated them
Speaker 4: from the potable alcohols, which were taxed differently. So I
Speaker 4: think originally it was just an additive called methanol, which
Speaker 4: is a wood alcohol that is, you know, in certain
Speaker 4: doses toxic when consumed by humans.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, absolutely, And we see I think you did
Speaker 1: a great job outlining this. We see a couple of
Speaker 1: concurrent motivations for this. Right, let's make sure that we
Speaker 1: still get paid and we can separate the different types
Speaker 1: of alcohol. But as prohibition was enacted and continued, First off,
Speaker 1: the people who argued in favor for prohibition were completely wrong.
Speaker 1: At least in this case, the economy was not helped
Speaker 1: in any shape fashion.
Speaker 3: Or form.
Speaker 1: I'm sure law enforcement received some more money as they
Speaker 1: were trying this impossible war on drugs mission, but the
Speaker 1: moral character didn't exactly improve either because people kept drinking.
Speaker 4: Well, not only did it not improve, it just kind
Speaker 4: of fed the monster that is organized crime and all
Speaker 4: of these underground distilleries and speakeasies and.
Speaker 3: Just pure outright thievery.
Speaker 4: Because that industrial alcohol we were talking about, that was
Speaker 4: the stuff he needed to make the bootleg booze. So
Speaker 4: you know, people were actively pulling off heists to get
Speaker 4: this stuff. And here's the thing that's so cool, Ben,
Speaker 4: this is something I didn't know. They call this this
Speaker 4: topic of today's episode, the chemists wore, and it's for
Speaker 4: good reason. It's because the methanol that was in that
Speaker 4: industrial alcohol could actually be slightly removed or it could be.
Speaker 3: Like redistilled, mitigating, mitigated.
Speaker 4: And so that's what the chemists that the bootleggers or
Speaker 4: the gangsters hired we're doing. And obviously they would pay
Speaker 4: their chemist way better than the government chemist, so they
Speaker 4: might attract better talent.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And we know there was this huge industry of
Speaker 1: illegal alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale.
Speaker 3: It booms very.
Speaker 1: Very quickly after prohibition, and what we find is kind
Speaker 1: of this proto breaking bad situation. This really is a
Speaker 1: chemist war. In an essay written in the twenties called
Speaker 1: Our Essay in Extermination by a doctor named Charles Norris,
Speaker 1: who was a Chief Medical Examiner of New York City
Speaker 1: at the time, he details the size of this trade.
Speaker 1: He says the federal government admits that while eighty million
Speaker 1: gallons of grain alcohol are manufactured yearly under permit, only
Speaker 1: about seventy million gallons of it turn up again in
Speaker 1: legally manufactured products. That means ten million gallons estimated per
Speaker 1: year are being taken by these groups of gangsters, handed
Speaker 1: to their like evil wizard chemists, and they're cleaning it
Speaker 1: out or making it less lethal hopefully, and then they're
Speaker 1: selling it, you know, in the back rooms as speakeasies
Speaker 1: across the nation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's the thing too, Like, if you were
Speaker 4: just an average workaday Joe trying to get your boose
Speaker 4: fix on going one of these speakeasies, you didn't know
Speaker 4: where it was coming from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you didn't know what.
Speaker 4: The It's like buying illegal street drugs today, Like, you know,
Speaker 4: you have no idea what additives or impurities are in it.
Speaker 4: You are trusting in your supplier to not kill you.
Speaker 3: Right, And even before.
Speaker 4: The craziness let's loose that we're about to get into,
Speaker 4: people were dying from alcohol poisoning because sometimes those chemists
Speaker 4: didn't do a good enough job of getting this stuff
Speaker 4: out of there, and it was always impure even if
Speaker 4: they did do a decent job.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely, And when we say the effected people's health,
Speaker 1: we're talking about very dark stuff. People died, people encountered paralysis.
Speaker 1: You know that old trope about drinking moonshine and going blind.
Speaker 1: Some people did go blind. Yeah, not a whole ton,
Speaker 1: but we have some spooky numbers for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's crazy that I found this article or some
Speaker 4: blog post about something called ginger jake.
Speaker 3: Ginger Jake was a medicine.
Speaker 4: It was actually got around prohibition because it was sold
Speaker 4: as a medicine and it had something in it called
Speaker 4: tricrestal phosphate that actually helped kind of trick the government's
Speaker 4: tests into, you know, seeing it as being a pure
Speaker 4: alcohol or you know, having no medicinal value whatsoever. But
Speaker 4: essentially it was just ginger flavored alcohol. But apparently this
Speaker 4: additive they used, unbeknownst to the company, I imagine, was
Speaker 4: a very very slow acting neurotoxin, so it took time
Speaker 4: for it to take hold, and then eventually it actually
Speaker 4: started to cause all kinds of leg muscular pains and weakness,
Speaker 4: and it caused a type of paralysis. According to this uh,
Speaker 4: this post would actually have a very distinctive walk associated
Speaker 4: it with it where people would have to like lift
Speaker 4: their legs up entirely, sort of like the Ministry of
Speaker 4: Silly Walks from the Monty Python Show, you know, the Jakewalk,
Speaker 4: the Jake Walk exactly, and we actually have a song.
Speaker 4: The interesting thing about this is it was apparently baffling
Speaker 4: to doctors and toxicologists in the US, but it was
Speaker 4: actually a couple of blues singers who identified the source
Speaker 4: of this in two different songs, one by Isham Bracy
Speaker 4: called Jake Liquor Blues.
Speaker 3: Hear a little clip of that.
Speaker 2: Money.
Speaker 4: And then we also have Tommy Johnson who kind of
Speaker 4: figured out the source of this condition in his Tongue
Speaker 4: Alcohol and Jake Blues.
Speaker 3: When do a clip of that? Yes, please nog ho.
Speaker 1: Y do no.
Speaker 2: Fill? Let me that b Martin no home look you man,
Speaker 2: let it one man, Oh, don't kid.
Speaker 1: No. So they're part They're not neurologists, obviously, but they
Speaker 1: are part of the community where the people encounter this
Speaker 1: stuff on a regular basis.
Speaker 4: That's right, Because you know, the rich, the swells, the
Speaker 4: high society types, who weren't these kind of Bible thumping
Speaker 4: prohibition pushers, they were able to get imported booze from
Speaker 4: places like Europe or the Caribbean. You can get rum,
Speaker 4: very expensive. You had to know people, but it could
Speaker 4: be done. But the lower class had to rely on
Speaker 4: this super cheap, dangerous street bootleg stuff.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. People would also buy things that were counterfeit spirits.
Speaker 1: They were advertised perhaps as whiskey or they were advertised
Speaker 1: as vodka, but instead.
Speaker 3: They were.
Speaker 1: You know, they were tarted up industrial alcol products, and
Speaker 1: they contained a lot of terrible stuff, not just the neurotoxins,
Speaker 1: which this was a really interesting story about Jake. I
Speaker 1: think they didn't figure out the neurological damage it's capable
Speaker 1: of until what the seventies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think it was even worse than they
Speaker 4: originally had even thought. Turns out that it actually damaged
Speaker 4: the movement control neurons in the brain or the upper
Speaker 4: motor neurons.
Speaker 3: And thankfully, you know, this is about.
Speaker 4: Fifty years later, but they had of course tracked down
Speaker 4: all of the offending stuff and it was outlawed and gone.
Speaker 4: But this is interesting because this is a company that's
Speaker 4: doing this. This is a company that's trying to make
Speaker 4: a buck by cheating the system during prohibition.
Speaker 1: Right, right, And they're not the only one. This also
Speaker 1: affects pharmacies. They were allowed to dispense whiskey with a prescription,
Speaker 1: So who runs the prescription pad? Right?
Speaker 3: Interesting?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And religious authorities that require or i should say
Speaker 1: institute religious institutions that required alcohol or ceremonies also came
Speaker 1: under the control of criminal organizations. And it was it's
Speaker 1: similar to how when marijuana was legalized or decriminalized medically
Speaker 1: first in California, a lot of people developed nebulous medical conditions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they could get their prescriptions.
Speaker 4: A hard time sleeping. Are you got you know, restless
Speaker 4: leg syndrome or something?
Speaker 1: And there were a lot more people claiming to be
Speaker 1: adherents of certain churches or religious organizations.
Speaker 3: People found Jesus, are you saying al Capone was running
Speaker 3: communion line.
Speaker 1: My man people like him were involved for sure, and
Speaker 1: this this was helpful because these were sources of alcohol
Speaker 1: that was less likely to be contaminated. But while this
Speaker 1: was happening, the government realized that all the predictions they
Speaker 1: had made were wrong. Turned out alcoholism and health problems
Speaker 1: do true. Alcohol consumption were not going down, they were
Speaker 1: going up, right, Like alcohol declined a little bit, but
Speaker 1: a ton of restaurants closed because, as you know, many
Speaker 1: restaurants make their largest amount of profit off of spirit sales. Sure,
Speaker 1: and then the markup right right because of the markup,
Speaker 1: and then the government figured out that there was a
Speaker 1: massive leak they could not plug somewhere along the production
Speaker 1: line of industrial alcohol manufacture and legal use, Like millions
Speaker 1: of gallons were disappearing, and so they made a pretty brutal,
Speaker 1: ruthless decision.
Speaker 4: It really did ben So earlier we alluded to the
Speaker 4: chemists War during Prohibition, and I would argue that's something
Speaker 4: that was kind of ongoing even before this brutal move
Speaker 4: we're about to talk about. But it really kicked in
Speaker 4: the high gear when the US government decided to require
Speaker 4: these industries manufacturers of this industrial alcohol to start adding
Speaker 4: all kinds of horrible stuff to their product, and I guess,
Speaker 4: to the government's credit, that's not really the right way
Speaker 4: to put it at all. But they were transparent about it.
Speaker 4: They wanted people to know. It was in the papers.
Speaker 4: In fact, in the Vox article, the headline from a
Speaker 4: clipping reads government to double alcohol poison content and also
Speaker 4: add benzene smell warns drinkers, So they knew.
Speaker 3: What people are doing. Yeah, they wanted them.
Speaker 4: To know, we're gonna make this stuff even more poison
Speaker 4: than it already is. And the assumption there was that
Speaker 4: people were going to look out have some sort of
Speaker 4: self preservation instinct, not the case. People already were showing
Speaker 4: that they lacked that entirely when they were drinking this
Speaker 4: stuff off the streets that was already very, very dangerous
Speaker 4: and adulterated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was in nineteen twenty six, and as you say, Noel,
Speaker 1: to their credit, they were very public about this. But
Speaker 1: the reason we call this a brutal, ruthless thing is
Speaker 1: that it was clearly an indefensible, illogical statement. It was
Speaker 1: both trying to punish people for a moral decision and
Speaker 1: then also remove any perceived culpability from the inevitable consequences
Speaker 1: of this terrible decision. Yeah, they put benzene in there.
Speaker 1: They also put mercury in there, I.
Speaker 3: Think a Canda Strych nine, I believe.
Speaker 4: But the biggest one was that they doubled that methanol
Speaker 4: that was in there. And the reason that that one
Speaker 4: was the doozy is because it was so similar to
Speaker 4: the alcohol itself atomically that it bonded with it in
Speaker 4: a way that was very difficult for the chemists to
Speaker 4: fully get rid of it by redistilling it or whatever.
Speaker 4: I'm not an alcohol chemist, but whatever they went there
Speaker 4: to do, it was hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it was so closely intertwined with the drinking alcohol. Right.
Speaker 1: And Charles Norris, who we mentioned earlier in that essay,
Speaker 1: he and Alexander Gettler, who was the chief toxicologist of
Speaker 1: New York at the time, they both told the government
Speaker 1: not to do it. The government did it, and instantly
Speaker 1: people started dying. It was called this was called the
Speaker 1: alcohol of the Country by Bloom because it was very
Speaker 1: easily accessible stuff. We have a lot of information about
Speaker 1: this in New York City especially, but we know that
Speaker 1: at this time bootleggers had nationwide transit infrastructure. So this
Speaker 1: stuff was going everywhere. And the estimates for the deaths
Speaker 1: are a little bit fuzzy because some of the deaths
Speaker 1: were were just the result of alcoholism. But the problem
Speaker 1: is that at the time alcoholism like drinking oneself to
Speaker 1: death from regular old alcohol that was listed as a
Speaker 1: natural death in obituaries. This was something very different. This
Speaker 1: was death by poison.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this got Charles Norris, who you read from
Speaker 4: his essay earlier, who was the chief medical Examiner in
Speaker 4: New York City, was just wholesale against this. He's like,
Speaker 4: this is a really bad idea. Government, please don't do this.
Speaker 4: And of course they didn't listen to him, and so
Speaker 4: he referred to this and actually ties in with the
Speaker 4: title of that essay, he referred to this as quote
Speaker 4: our national experiment in extermination. So it really is almost
Speaker 4: like this idea of like they call them souses, you know,
Speaker 4: the drunks or whatever. It's almost like the government actively
Speaker 4: wanted to kill them.
Speaker 2: And in this.
Speaker 4: Slate article, it describes an event that happened on Christmas
Speaker 4: Eve of nineteen twenty six when a man goes into
Speaker 4: Bellevue Hospital in New York and is terrified that Santa
Speaker 4: Claus is coming after him to kill him with a
Speaker 4: baseball bat. As it turns out, he was in fact
Speaker 4: experiencing hallucination as a result of this poisonous stuff.
Speaker 3: And again, you know the government knew, I mean, I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 4: It just seems like so ill informed, Like obviously prohibition
Speaker 4: wasn't working.
Speaker 3: They knew prohibition wasn't working.
Speaker 4: They wanted up the anty by doing this, But did
Speaker 4: they really think this.
Speaker 3: Was going to stop people? They had to know people
Speaker 3: were going to drink it.
Speaker 1: The approach they appear to have taken here, or rather
Speaker 1: the stance would be that you have to break a
Speaker 1: few drunk eggs to make a sober omelet, or the
Speaker 1: dangerous argument we've talked about before, the belief and the
Speaker 1: greater good. But yeah, almost one hundred people died, as
Speaker 1: you said, in December nineteen twenty six, the week of Christmas,
Speaker 1: due to this, the same year that the government passed
Speaker 1: these regulations, and hundreds would die in the following years.
Speaker 1: This had intentionally been rendered fatal, and Calvin Coolidge was
Speaker 1: the president at the time, and under his administration these
Speaker 1: deaths were not seen as a problem. It was kind
Speaker 1: of like shrug, things happen, but overall it is getting
Speaker 1: drunks off the streets.
Speaker 4: Well, it's sort of like the is it the president
Speaker 4: of the Philippines who basically advocates for murdering drug dealers
Speaker 4: in the streets?
Speaker 3: Similar vibe, only a little more roundabout way of doing it.
Speaker 4: I mean, at least de Terte says what he means
Speaker 4: and isn't trying to hide behind some kind of puritanical
Speaker 4: curtain like these guys.
Speaker 3: You know, it's very, very troubling.
Speaker 1: Norris is walking a thin line on this prohibition issue
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, because he is the chief
Speaker 1: Medical Examiner, so he has street cred and he's I
Speaker 1: think in a little bit of a safer place to
Speaker 1: argue against prohibition. And he says that something must be
Speaker 1: added to grain alcohol to prevent it being all drunk
Speaker 1: away and thereby deny it to legitimate industry and business.
Speaker 1: So he says, Okay, we have to add some kind
Speaker 1: of contaminate, but methanol. Seriously, that's going to kill people.
Speaker 1: He didn't really propose a different additive, or I couldn't
Speaker 1: find a different additive that he proposed. But he also
Speaker 1: he also mentioned something that was really powerful and pressing
Speaker 1: it for his time. He revealed how the New York
Speaker 1: administration of the twenties looked at certain populations as disposable alcoholics,
Speaker 1: certain types of immigrants, the poor, as we mentioned at
Speaker 1: the top of this episode, and there were a couple
Speaker 1: of different rules, like two sets of rules, one for
Speaker 1: the wealthy people who are drinking a lot and one
Speaker 1: for the quote unquote degenerates. And Norris points out that
Speaker 1: private physicians will rarely expose their deceased customers to the
Speaker 1: indignity of a post mortem examination, and then they'll just
Speaker 1: call those deaths those alcohol related deaths deaths by some
Speaker 1: sort of natural cause. They still look upright and respectable
Speaker 1: even in the afterlife.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Ben, and I think there's this quote from the
Speaker 4: Chicago Tribune that was cited in the Slay article. It
Speaker 4: really sums up this whole problem that we're trying to
Speaker 4: kind of wrap our heads around for nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 4: It says, quote, normally, no American government would engage in
Speaker 4: such business as poisoning its own citizens. It is only
Speaker 4: in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous,
Speaker 4: are considered justified. So, I mean, I think that really
Speaker 4: sums up the mindset of like this whole era some
Speaker 4: moral crusade, a total moral crusade that did eventually come
Speaker 4: to an end.
Speaker 1: Yes, luckily, luckily for everyone involved. Teetotalers and boos enthusiasts.
Speaker 1: A like, prohibition of alcohol was repealed in nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: so it didn't last that long, just a span of
Speaker 1: about thirteen ridiculous years now were there were there plus
Speaker 1: to alcohol prohibition. Sure, for certain parties, it was great
Speaker 1: for organized crime, right, Yeah, it was great for law enforcement,
Speaker 1: that's job security because it's an unending war. But for
Speaker 1: the majority of the country, it was demonstrably a bad thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure sounds like it to me. But I don't
Speaker 3: really see too much of a silver lining here.
Speaker 4: So, and it's interesting the way we're seeing this kind
Speaker 4: of repeat with marijuana prohibition and the way the tide
Speaker 4: is turning with that. It's really interesting to kind of
Speaker 4: be quite a time to be alive just to see
Speaker 4: these things kind of change and see the kind of
Speaker 4: puritanical attitudes kind of making their way out of fashion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is strange because in the current situation regarding marijuana,
Speaker 1: especially in the US. There's some states where it's completely legal,
Speaker 1: and there are some states where it's still a very
Speaker 1: serious offense to what possess it carried around grow it.
Speaker 1: And one of the huge factors in the turning tide
Speaker 1: regarding marijuana legislation has honestly been not so much the
Speaker 1: science behind the substance itself, but the economic benefit to
Speaker 1: governments and businesses of making it legal.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure, I mean that's certainly.
Speaker 4: You see dollar signs in some of these formerly teetotalin officials,
Speaker 4: right and yeah, And you would think that with all
Speaker 4: this concern about the economy with this original prohibition, that
Speaker 4: would have been a little bit more on people's minds
Speaker 4: instead of just funneling all that money into the.
Speaker 3: Abyss that is the black market, you know.
Speaker 1: Right, right. And after prohibition on alcohol ended on the
Speaker 1: federal level in December fifth of thirty three, some states
Speaker 1: decided to stay dry states for up to a third
Speaker 1: of a century longer.
Speaker 3: Well, we still have dry counties in the US.
Speaker 4: I know Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is a there's really
Speaker 4: beautiful mountain cabins you can rent there.
Speaker 3: That is a dry county. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's interesting too.
Speaker 4: I want to point out there's something that I noticed
Speaker 4: as a correction in one of these articles. I think
Speaker 4: it was in the Slate article. They mischaracterized the eighteenth
Speaker 4: Amendment as prohibiting the consumption of.
Speaker 3: Alcohol that was not illegal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was just the manufacturer, manufacturing, and distribution, right,
Speaker 1: import exports.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting distinction there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, right, it's kind of like the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 3: That's right, you can go after it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Currently, as we record here in the US, there are
Speaker 1: still hundreds of dry counties across the country. About ten
Speaker 1: percent of the country is still what would be considered dry,
Speaker 1: and about eighteen million people or so live live in
Speaker 1: that area.
Speaker 3: Nobody knows how dry I am, Ben, No one.
Speaker 1: Knows the dryness you've seen.
Speaker 4: Isn't it weird that the always see drunk people singing
Speaker 4: that song? I know I'm talking about like in cartoons.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody nobody.
Speaker 2: Right, don't story yourself, sir, Lari.
Speaker 1: And on that note, feel free to send us your
Speaker 1: favorite drunken single longs if you find them online. We
Speaker 1: want to thank you so much for taking this strange
Speaker 1: journey with us. If you would like to learn more,
Speaker 1: we can recommend reading Charles Norris's essay and Extermination in full.
Speaker 1: Deborah Blooms Poisonous Handbook is a great thing, and it's
Speaker 1: not just about prohibition. Sure, if you liked our arsenic episode,
Speaker 1: you'll also love Poisoner's Handbook absolutely.
Speaker 4: And we would of course like to thank our super
Speaker 4: producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, our
Speaker 4: research associate Christopher Hasiotis, who hiped us to today's topic.
Speaker 3: And I want to thank you right well, you Ben,
Speaker 3: I'm looking at you.
Speaker 1: Oh, and thank you Noel.
Speaker 3: See you next time.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 4: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.