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Funding for this program
provided in part by
Bank of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland.
One of the most bitter conflicts
people of the United States came between the government and the
the government took extreme inmeasures to see to it thatn
people did not consume
We'll find out just how far things went from Deborah Blum.
She's the author of "The
Welcome to University Place Presents. Thank you. Poisoner's Handbook."
Now before we get into It's great to be here.
you have some jewelry that prohibition, per se, I see
Some very distinctive is frostuff there.time.
What exactly did you bring? Yes, I brought some 1920s
jewelry to show you.
This is a flapper snake one of those nice little flapper And actually if I was wearing
wrap around my upper arm. I actually don't know why they
were so fascinated by snakes
in the 1920s. I have a theory. You do?
Yeah, I think it was the
tomb in 1922, that made all those things happen.
Oh, that's really, because
Cleopatra kind of asp. this would be like a
show you is a poison But the other thing I brought to
And if you look very carefully ring from the period.
And what would be the social you'll see I can pop the catch.
Well, let's say I really context for using one of those?
were asking, I'm leaving this da little loose, but I mightu
say can I fix your coffee?
for you. And as you see, Let me stir in a little cream
it, but right here I've opened up this little
compartment, and this would actually hold a lethal dose
of something like cyanide or
available at the time. strychnine which were widely
You could buy them at What I love about this is that They were tonics.
of what a poison ring looks like, and they think it's some
visible big honking thing.
were very deceptive. But real poison rings
Are those things readily So this one is an example.
available? They don't make them now the
When I got this one, I bought it way they used to.
sons said to me did you go to the jeweler and say can I just
see those rings you keep under the counter.
Were they special order?
how people acquired them. ThereWell, it was an age ofabout
secrecy in the 1920s. It was an age of getting away
with things. No matter who
were in the chain of you were or how high you
fashionable. I guess not the authority, it seemed to be
in places almost that high White House so much but
snip one over on the government. in government circles to
I always think of the 1920s as being one of the most
anarchistic periods in American history because here you have
a time when across the country
passed amendment of peoplthe Constitution. newly
Knowingly and willingly they're figuring out ways to evade
American law, and it's not just little sects of society, not
to say that there weren't more
that, but in their kitchens, extreme criminal examples of
backyards, in their garages, in their bathtubs, in their
hiding it consistently people were breaking the law and
secretive speakeasies. or going out to little
this national movement So in that sense there's like
interesting lawlessness. toward a kind of really
brush to it, there were two Ikinds of alcoholic beverage.
There was the kind that was made by real distilleries or
breweries and smuggled into the country, and then there
was what might be called the
There was home-grown and then there was the ongoing theft by
gangster bootlegger syndicates, the kind of Al Capone side of
this, to steal denatured alcohol
made industrial alcohol. from the factories that
grain alcohol, in which you've And denatured alcohol is in fact
so it's non-potable. added some contaminants
medical instruments or it's Anfuel alcohol, and so thean
bootleggers, one of the ways
they would, aside from brewing it
themselves, is they'd steal this
to get the contaminants out of denatured alcohol and then try
label on it, dye it a little it, package it, stick like a rum
And by about 1926, 60 million gallons of denatured alcohol was
being stolen every year.
have been perfectly respectable So thgrain alcohol in themight
first place?
Right. Denaturing laws say this: you're
drinking alcohol. maIt's non-potable alcohol.ot
And if you're on that side of the alcohol business, you don't
have to pay all the taxes and fees that alcohol producers
make, but you have to follow
denaturing, essentially taking government formulas for
it into non-drinkable alcohol. the natural alcohol and turning
a chemist and remove the But if you could go in there as
something that makes it taste bad, then you can repackage and
sell that alcohol. And so the bootleggers realized that
they could make a lot of money
and that all these little hidden if they could steal this
of them, couldn't keep up with stills, and there were a lot
So you had alcohol smuggled in what the factories were doing.
beginning before the government frgot much more efficient athe
keeping that out, you had home-brewed bathtub gin, which
usually really nasty stuff, and you had repackaged denatured
alcohol, which was also really
chemists really usually couldn't get everything out.
You didn't know how good the
place who was doing this. cThat's exactly right.st
And it's one reason that a lot
frou-frou cocktails were of our really famous sort of
era because people were forever itrying to come up with ways to
hide the taste of the alcohol.
nasty stuff. So you'd put The orange juice in it andgh,
make a screwdriver. You'd put tomato juice in it
and make a bloody Mary. You'd put a whole bunch of fruit
juices and cordials and make a
famous ones, or sidecar. bee's knees, was one of the
York City alone during I am amazed to hear that in New
speakeasies. And you can prohibition there were 30,000
growth of these because imwe're really talkingng
about prohibition goes into effect in 1920, it's killed off
in the Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1933, and in
13 years they add 30,000
bars and restaurants of these secret little
It's kind of phenomenal. and backdoor saloons.
continued to drink in that time. And it tells you how much people
through newspapers of the times, And if you go back and look
of people behind bars, even grandmothers behind bars for
making bathtub gin. That's exactly right.
And one of the things you have
homebrew, is that you're getting to realize about all this
you're fermenting it to alcohol, an organic material and
rushing out into wheat but it's not like people were
brewing great grain alcohol. fields or cornfields and
So some of these homebrews They couldn't do that.
distillation of their furniture. people did destructive
They get wood alcohol? Of their furniture?
They got wood alcohol. Varnish notwithstanding.
There were actually some Yes.
a still and rain poison ivy mthrough it because poison ivyid
vines are all over the place. In the winter they just
stripped them down and ran
So you really didn't know what you were drinking and it
could be way more interesting than you wanted it to be.
So was there a point at which you say that the government
became much better at stopping
from coming into the country? the That was probably thetuff
one real government enforcement success story.
They couldn't keep it from
States but they got better and happening in the United
Actually, one of my favorite better at keeping it out.
use today is built from that stories, some of the language we
most famous smugglers was smua guy named Bill McCoy.the
He would run ships down to
And it was always really good rum. It was real whiskey.
It was, in fact, the real McCoy.
And Bill McCoy was arrested and sent to prison about two years
into prohibition, and the same
Canada. And that's why thing starts happening from
less good grain alcohol, eventually there's less and
United States and more and more and more of this, make it in
your bathtub kind of effect.
And something else happens. So You're not longer evener.
able to smuggle, say, wine, even in from Canada.
Everything's hard liquor. That's what people could make.
They could make whiskey.
They couldn't make wine. They could make hard liquor.
They weren't making beer, And so you get this incredible bathtub.
prohibition because all that rise in alcoholism during
liquor. So tell me more about beer. Why is beer not a bigger part of there is to drink is hard
Beer was a major target of the picture?
The big breweries, in thfact, owned a lot of thes.
pre-prohibition saloons.
where crime brewed, and when These were seen as locations
government really shut prohibition came in the
The breweries themselves were a major target and you see this
across the country. And by the
before prohibition, this end of prohibition, we had,
breweries everywhere, and at the wonderful variety of beers and
that had really survived were, end of prohibition the only ones
made fake beer and they made Anheuser-Busch, for instance,
of other products to just keep cereal and they made all kinds
prohibition. themselves in business through
And the other thing about beer But beer was a real target.
very distinctive odor, right? wasSure, that yeasty smell. a
So you had the enforcement
neighborhoods looking for stills agencies prowling around
and beer was a major signal. which they knew were anywhere,
secret illegal beer because they were going for things that
weren't quite as aromatic.
markup wasn't as good as it would be for hard liquor, too.
There would be that, yes. I gather there would be major
publicity campaigns to let the
smashing another still today or this would be a good news story
to break an illicit warehouse.
And they used to do very public demonstrations of destroying
stills. They welcomed publicity for raids, for
destruction of stills or
catch of liquor or whiskey, or when they would get a secret
They would make a point of sometimes barrels of alcohol.
calling newspapers and dumping calling photographers and
the most public way possible. iI can only imagine.n
There must have been a lot
other creatures down there. Rats down in the sewers.
That's right. Staggering around the sewers.
So, in terms of what the
what the federal government governwas actually afterafter,
during prohibition, where were they coming from?
Well, prohibition was a highly moral idea.
And some of it was driven by
after World War I. The world that complete sense of disarray
us, and we have this image is falling apart all around
time. It was driven a lot by religious of this purer, simpler
felt that it was a rural versus Turban kind of crusade, theseo
dens of inequity that were the
consuming massive amounts of big cities where people were
consuming massive amounts of alcohol, and they were in fact
straightened out. And some people argued that it
was an anti-immigrant...
drink wine, Germans would drink beer, Irish would drink.
That's exactly right, Irish whiskey.
So all of those things went into
we're going to become a more effect, but the sales pitch was
we dry the United States out moral, better country, and once
on a higher plane. we'll all be functioning
anywhere else on a national level, do you know? No. We were like the test case for
what doesn't work when you run
Who were the voices saying in a1917, 1918, if you try this.
on a federal level it's not going to work?
Well, among them were the people, I wrote a book about
looking at some of the people who pushed back against
prohibition in the 1920s and
The heroes of my book "The some of them were scientists.
instance, started crusading against prohibition before it
even went into effect because they were starting to see early
on an increase in wood alcohol
And so they actually started deaths in New York City.
think, think, think. saying wait a minute,
drinking, but what you're Peopgoing to see is morequit
poisonous alcohol.
public health officials, you And then throughout, you saw
the people in my book, who were smedical examiners who weree
starting to see people dying
wait, think, this is going from poisoned alcohol saying
alcohol deaths, we're seeing really badly, we're seeing more
in the cities, push back, push back, push back.
And they were very public about it. Then if you
actually look at the politics of it, you'll see that
in the newspapers of the
legislators and wet legislators. time they'll talk about dry
you had that political split. It's just that the dry
legislators for much of the 1920s were in power.
They were mostly republican.
power by some of these sort of moralistic crusaders.
They were somewhat hypocritical.
Hoover famously called For instance, Herbert
Was he the one who came thisup with that term?ent.
But Herbert Hoover used to go over to the Belgian embassy and
drink good whiskey from the continent because that was not
United States territory and so
there. you could drink good whiskey
So they were a little bit politicians were in major power, But through the 1920s the dry
push back, push back, but they and you see wets push back,
power to change anything. It seems kind of oversimplified,
doesn't it, to say dry
seems to me there were at least two kinds of so-called
wet politicians.
is wonderful, there's nothing Twrong with it, you can drinkl
it and everything should be just fine if you're at all
responsible. But there are
or may not be moral, but also those who say it may
because people are going to itdrink it anyway and thist
is what's going to happen if you try to ban it.
So moralist versus practical. It was.
And the dry versus wet thing was
You're a headline writer. laSure, we still see thatnd.
today in politics.
it was so concise, but yes, if It totally caught on because
the drys you saw a complex array you looked at both the wets and
Some of the people who pushed back against prohibition early
on were actually university presidents and legal scholars
who said we don't believe that there's anything in the
Constitution that justifies this
into private decisions. And the decision to drink or not ton
drink is a personal decision. So now you're getting right down
into these very individual
don't believe that government lishould be doing that.we
So some of the push back, in
health push back that I was adescribing, came from peoplec
like that who were just like, this is completely wrong.
Some of the wets were people who
or Missouri which had had cwonderful brewery cultures and
were watching this ripple effect of economic destruction.
We're, one, seeing that it
seeing that it did a lot of harm, and we're saying think
again, this is just definitely
Prohibition seems, more than not a smart policy move.
kind of the pace, the cultural pace, for the 1920s.
This whole sense of getting away with something.
Everybody gets to get away with something.
And you see it has this ripple effect across the way
people behaved because it becomes coast to coast
acceptable to try to
You see the role of women changes usually in this culture.
First they get the vote.
prohibition but the 19th The 18th Amendment was
So women have gotten to vote, and now women can sneak out and
go to bars. The old-time saloons were guys
men only, but the speakeasies The owere open to everyone. were
Find somebody like her
Right, it fostered the that brings her own.
Now they don't have long, difficult-to-manage hair..
They have short hair. They have bobs.
Bobbed hair, short skirts,
So the whole sort of culture of women changed, and prohibition
fostered a different style of going out, a different style of
music and at core the belief
away with it, which people did. thatPeople broke the lawget
deliberately every day, and although the raids
were very publicized, they barely touched it.
So in a place, I'll just use
could be New York, what kind Wisconsin as an example, but it
prohibition law? of loopholes were there in the
Alcohol was not 100% banned. Right.
write you a prescription There was some, doctors could
You can see these still on eBay, for medicinal alcohol.
people believed that alcohol the old prescription forms, but
sedative qualities. Or really nervous people had to
drink a little bit. So you could get your
doctor to write you a prescription for alcohol.
There was huge debate over
Oh, sure. How much do you get to have at
communion. That's exactly right.
And I believed that the government allowed states to set
their own standards, and some did and some didn't allow
sacramental wine. But those were two examples of
sort of simple loopholes. There was for a while Ford Motor
Company in the 1920s was
ethanol, and the government made developing a car that ran on
them stop doing it. Wow. I know it's so backwards.
But they were developing a
cheap fuel, but then the car that ran on ethanol as a
So the government actually went to Ford and said you can't have.
this car and use this ethanol fuel because you're fueling the
illegal alcohol trade.
coming at it in all So kinds of directions.nt
And you see also, I was talking about the breweries being an
economic effect, but one of the things people forget is there
were other agricultural industries that were affected.
I was going to ask
You wonder about corn production, grain production,
certainly hops, even orchards that would make wine.
That's right. And people
the number one use of forgapples was for hardtion
cider.
Johnny Appleseed, we never got the whole story there, did
He was beloved for his we?
wherever he went. And the famous picture of one of
the famous crusaders against
Nation, has an axe. People think, oh, well she was
breaking up, what?
Is that so. That's the symbolism of the She was chopaxe. down apple trees.
growers in this desperate push And so you find the apple
when we can't have hard cider, to say how do we sell apples
slogan an apple a day keeps andthe doctor away to try toth a
persuade people that apples were healthy. No one knew it.
There was no food science to show that apples were
good for you. But they made up this slogan to
suggest that apples had medicinal properties and
to keep apples being sold.
prohibition, again that's Soa getting away withof
it kind of technique. So were these various
agricultural industries affected
They must have been if much of adversely by prohibition?
kind of alcohol production your crop is dedicated to some
you're told no. Apples took a huge hit. Grapes.
Grape growers, if you think of vineyards for wine,
took a huge hit.
corn went into things. Wheat went to other things and
used for industrial alcohols. AnSo everyone is trying, and Ibe
think I referred back to
up with new products. Anheuser-Busch come up with,
it's called Bevo, this horrible grain-based nonalcoholic drink.
So they were all
And I think Anheuser-Busch looking for new uses.
actually came up with some bizarre
grain-based, it wasn't like a baby formula but it was
some kind of grain drink
to your infants. you were supposed to feed
coming up with new They were desperate so they were
So by 1926, let's say, when the government becomes so
effective at stopping the smuggling of legitimately made
manufactured alcohol of one kind
burgeoning industry even or another, now they have this
the home-grown alcohol. That's exactly right.
How did that play out in terms
government, and what steps did of the effectiveness of the
to it that homemade talcohol didn't catch on?e
That's a great question.
a kind of rebellion in state By 1926 you were starting to see
governments sort of oozing across
the country, with a lot of
us a lot of money, this isn't sworking, and also crime andg
going up because the illegal
flourished in the era of liquor syndicates really
prcriminal groups became muchnd larger in Chicago, in New York,
in Milwaukee. You see the rise of these bootlegging
syndicates and they start playing really rough.
So a lot of states started
the prohibition. saying how can I end run
but the enforcement of it, It's a Constitutional amendment
it was the Volstead Act. the national enforcement of
the teeth. And then every state early on passed laws
enforcing or backing up the Volstead law so that you
had not only federal agents but you had state agents.
By about 1926 you see this starting to go away.
New York actually defunded its
division right about 1926, 1927. entire prohibition enforcement
In 1926 Wisconsin actually Wisconsin starts doing that too.
beer back into circulation, vright? Which would have been
contrary to the amendment.
too bad for you. They're just saying
federal government. StThat's exactly right.he
And you see this tension when you're starting to look in the
newspapers in the '20s with the federal government starting
again to look at certain states and saying these are lawless
states. So what happens is in this period the
enforcement agencies are
The states are pulling back stheir troops, essentially,
by about 1926 to 1928.
The moonshiner culture that had been famous in the deep south
spread to everyone everywhere.
They're building little backyard People are making bathtub gin.
stills. They're using industrial alcohol for this?
No this is what they would be brewing their own, but the other
thing that is happening is now
massive amounts of the bootleggers are stealing
And so the federal government is spread too thin to whack out
every still so they make a
alcohol, 60 million gallons a dyear is a lot of alcohol, andl
what they did is they went to the manufacturers of industrial
alcohol and they said we don't
this so it tastes bad, we want just want you to contaminate
They actually, and we have you to make it really poisonous.
US Treasury Department, they're ouenforcing prohibition.he
Prohibition is really a law that
So it's a Treasury Department prohenforcement division.ohol.
The Treasury Department does not
then they had a whole have cphalanx of chemists.e, but
And these chemists went out and they developed new and more
poisonous formulas for
Their idea was the bootleggers industrial alcohol.
stuff will be so lethal, they won't be able to get the poison
out, their customers will drop
that way. They really dwanted to make it work thatit
way by killing the people who were drinking it.
That's exactly right. And so they come up with
these formulas. When you look at them now,
they're murderous formulas. They're putting in cyanide,
they're putting in benzene, they're stepping up methanol or
wood alcohol, and methanol
really poisonous. When you drink it your body
metabolizes it to formaldehyde
considerable concentration. The formic acid, there starts to
be an epidemic of blindness.
nerve and people start dying. And so going back just briefly
to my book, you have chemists working for medical examiners
often saying, are you crazy?
the first of these And they put this into effect,
By the end of that, the government poisoning was thought
to have killed about
The estimate is that poisoned alcohol during prohibition
killed 50,000 Americans.
alcohol that people were Mostly because this was wood
the government was responsible brewing, it was bad stuff, but
quarter of those deaths by this super poisoning of alcohol.
Were there some notable outbreaks of that kind of poisoning?
Well, in New York City, which
was a den of inequity, you
a year when it first started. saw aIt was phenomenal.aths
I was looking newspapers of the time, I was looking at the
Tribune, I looked at the LA Times, I looked at the Boston
papers, I'm looking at
So about the time that New York has started going alarm flares,
alarm flares. They've got 50 deaths in Chicago
Yes. In Milwaukee in one day. Now what happens
is you get a kind of
government has their chemists making these super formulas.
The bootleggers have more money than the government, basically.
It's a multibillion dollar
chemist to take it out. And you see this back and forth,
back and forth. If you go into the newspapers of the
time, seriously people are
Borja government. And the cChicago Tribune ran a greate
editorial in which they said
only US amendment that carries the 18th Amendment is the
And nevertheless, we're right in the middle of the
Coolidge/Hoover administrations,
I'm going to call the drys, and yothe drys are saying you'ret
breaking the law, aren't you? You're drinking
an illegal substance. We're telling you it's
poisonous. If you're stupid enough and if you are
immoral enough to have to get drunk and go out so that
you're willing to risk
too bad for you. drinking poisoned alcohol,
answer. And you actually see And that was really their
too, the kind of, does this in some newspapers
to protect the life of the US government have
There's some really angry discussion about it.
Eventually it just
They never took those formulas kind of dies out.
enforcing those too, mostly again because it's not working.
People are dying but
Well, of course, in the 1920s compared with today, even today
if there were a campaign of that
and such is poisoned, there kwould still be at least theh
occasional person who didn't
television, Internet, email, get it, whether it was by
1920s where access to that newspaper, radio, but in the
limited it would be even kind of media was so much more
wouldn't get the word in more likely that people just
And one of the points that the first place. Right.
medical examiner in New York chief
of these campaigns were most City, made was that a lot
and the poor. The people who weren't reading
newspapers or couldn't afford them.
The people who, we have this
prohibition. image of the high life of
Dorothy Parker and Robert And they're drinking their Oh, sure, yes.
having a fine old time. Although both of those guys were
serious alcoholics. But the poor people, they
weren't doing that. They didn't have these high-end
bootleggers. Some of these
they'd have their bootleggers at their parties so,
they were guaranteed
Down in the poor neighborhoods to get good stuff.
called smoke which was just fuel alcohol mixed with water.
It was five cents a glass but you could afford it.
People drank, rail
They drank Sterno and water. riders drank Sterno.
occasionally. And there was a drink called You still hear of that
Ginger Jake. Jamaican ginger which was a
bootleg approximation of an old drink that used to be sold, it
was a cheap drink of Jamaican ginger and alcohol that used to
be sold in pharmacies.
approximation of that that And they came up with an
it's a plasticizer. actIt attacks your nervousnd,
system the same way Lou Gehrig's disease does.
Literally, they had 30,000
crippled and damaged by tthe Ginger Jake episode.
And they tracked it down
through a system of pharmacies to bootleggers operating
Kind of the ultimate around the country.
Yeah, that's exactly right. These were poor people and so
the worst effects of
prohibition, the people who were most
likely to be poisoned, the
be suffered, were the people who people who were most likely to
good stuff or were distilling dtheir furniture or their weedse
because that's what they
So it was very much a little bit could get their hands on.
on. So what were the drys saying of a class warfare thing going
by 1926? By 1926 what you have is this
incredible level of frustration.
the country to shape up and straighten out and start
exhibiting good moral behavior, and instead you've got
thousands of speakeasies and
And they were just despairing peopof the moral characterees.
of the country. It wasn't that they were giving
it up, they were just trying
people to do this. to figure out how to get
almost hilarious, but And yodry recipe books.hey're
Here's how you can make something that tastes like
alcohol but isn't.
beautiful but nonalcoholic. HerAnd you see these things.t's
They're desperately trying to make this somehow be
And not to say that they gave it
up, but what you see is them trying different
ways to persuade people that this is better.
And the wheels continue to
turn. There were people who quit drinking.
When I was talking about the
and it was because so many 1920s as an anarchistic decade,
government never mind you Amerand your Constitutional the
amendments, I'm drinking. You can't tell me what to do.
You can't tell me.
You, the government, can't And that's really the argument.
And there's such a tell me how to live my life.
history, anyway. long-running theme in American
Civil War was a matter of Awell you can't tell me that Ie
can't do this or that.
have slaves, I live in the You can't tell me that I can't
south. That's exactly right. And so there is that long
history of every time the government imposes
something, even, let's
You can't tell me how sayto spend my money.e.
You can't tell me what to eat.
father or my nanny. People talk about nanny rules.
And the government today gives
what's healthy and what's not and makes recommendations about
how you should live but it
dinner plate. Do you know doesoff hand how prohibitionyour
came in and what's its
presidential politics? trajectory was in terms of
crusade started in the You know, the prohibition
to remember, so you're talking teens and, boy, I'm trying
about... You have Wilson in 1913.
And it was like faltering around until World War I.
What really pushed it over, you saw the final ratification was,
I'm thinking, 1919, so
that whole sense of the whaworld falling apart.as
I've asked myself if we hadn't
ratifications have come in? haBut there was such a feelingl
that we had to rebuild our
the prohibition forces really ctook advantage of and you didat
have a situation where the
Al Capone, but the saloon culture was a nasty culture.
And there was a lot of
You're never going to be arrogance around that.
We're a part of American life. able to get rid of us.
backs up at the time. And I had an argument, actually,
with one of my cousins
women, women who pushed abothrough prohibition.was
It was the women's vote.
been the women's vote. I said it can't have
Right, because they couldn't It was too late for that.
a lot of women, famous vote. But you did have
going to improve their men. womI don't think thatere
was as powerful as the
The war was sort of the thing that tipped us into prohibition.
And this deep sense for normalcy
that people did, at some level, aeven in states like Wisconsint
that had a long-time drinking culture, people really believed
that they needed to do this,
back on a different path. So that's really what I believe
drove prohibition. And also,
I'll call it a health and hygiene movement that seemed
to spring forth early in the
20th century. movement in the 20th century. Right, your Upton Sinclair.
That's exactly right. The jungle, you had Harvey
Washington Wiley, who was the first enforcer of the pure
food movement, actually sued
cocaine in the drink. CocaSure, a notable case. had
You're right. So you have all of that need to
sort of purify society
prohibition. coming together and driving
passes, this sort of higher Acalling comes into conflict.
It's not so much that people are
people drank a lot, it's desperate to drink, although
government telling them what that people don't want the
It's a personal thing. they can put in their glasses.
That's exactly right. IAnd that's even deeper rooted.
So you have those kind of two forces pushing all the time.
I'm going to make you a better individual.
You can't tell me how to live my life.
And that's the real battle
And eventually the you can't ground of prohibition.
wins because basically they just wore the other side out.
The country has not received
Crime has gone up. any higher moral ground.
People are losing money because, Alcoholism has gone up.
the crime syndicates, because the government is losing money,
it can't tax alcohol. And the other thing that put an end
to it was in fact the crash of 1929 because now you're
starting to see really desperate
source of income for the financial times, and a major
Tax. government and for the country.
Right. And all of the jobs that were lost at the breweries.
People are saying bring it back.
And so that was probably one of the other major sort of nails in
the coffin for prohibition
market crash of 1929. By 1933 things are still a
disaster in terms of the economy.
People are drinking like fishes still, and it's like enough
already.
18th Amendment. So FDRThat's right.coming intHappy days are here again.ng the repeal of the
amendment to be ratified, but it was gone in a year.
The states just went tumbling like dice to get rid of it.
I can't remember, was it New Jersey?
Wisconsin was in there early. It was somewhere around number
38 to ratify the 18th Amendment.
After it was already a done deal with the 36th state to ratify. RighBut it was top five onng.
repeal. It was pretty hasty to
repeal, and in some of the celebratory pictures of the
repeal of prohibition you'll
People were spilling see pictures of FDR, in fact.
They were lining up for drinks. intIt was majors.
rejoicing nationwide. What do you hear or what do
you think when you hear people
of alcohol to the prohibition coof, say, marijuana?on
Are their parallels there?
government campaign in the, I'm thinking, late '60s, early '70s,
in which they sprayed marijuana crops with paraquat,
which is a defoliant. However, those crops were still
harvested and people were getting this slightly or
possiThe government'soned marijuana.
You're going to smoke this or eat or however going to take in
this marijuana, too bad for you.
I mean really clobbered. It got clobbered as a policy.
comeback of heroin. We're seeing a tick up of heroin I thought about it with the
arrests and heroin deaths, right?
Heroin is illegal.
Heroin is a really dangerous drug. What I've thought about when we
see heroin come back is that
government can outlaw anything it
wants to, and you can tell
prohibition, this is a people, as certainly they did in
In the end it's still going to really dangerous thing.
peer group choice. be the individual choice or the
trendy again, totally illegal, And so you see heroin becoming
Now, nationwide you're not and you see this uptick.
The scale that was seeing anything like...
The scale. But you see it as a microcosm of the same
kind of behaviors.
questioning about the failure of And you do see more and more
that it's fed and made wealthy the illegal drug program the way
I know there's discussion in very dangerous crime syndicates.
legal entirely there. MI was just in Colorado where
medical marijuana is widely legal.
People were telling me that college students from around the
country are choosing Colorado campuses... To get that legal medical marijuana.
That's exactly right. Doctor's prescription.
For a hangnail is what I was told.
So you can look at it at that level and say did it work.
No, right?
because it is... Marijuana is a better comparison
So much more widespread in its use.
revisiting that discussion And it's maybe even worth
again. Does it work? Is it a source of income?
Would we be better off if we... Taxed it.
Taxed it and regulated it legally the way we do alcohol?
Is alcohol legal, grain alcohol still a huge problem? Sure. Is ethanol a poison?
Sure. Do people die from drinking alcohol now?
And it goes back to the same Sure.
get right into someone's thing. You really can't
personal bar and dinner plate and tell them how to live their
life because people are just not
that. Prohibition is a going to let the government do
failure, and we do see how great example of its
smaller scale today with difficult that is on a
everything. Deborah Blum, always a pleasure.
Thank you for filling us in about prohibition and its
weaknesses and perhaps its
there. strengths, too, somewhere in
Yes, perhaps a few. ThanI'm Norman Gilliland.ere. Thank you for joining us.
I hope you can join me the next time around for University Place
Presents.
Funding for this program
Bank of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.