I’ve read a lot about prohibition, but I never read about the government’s deliberate effort to make industrial alcohol undrinkably poisonous. Thousands of people seem to have died as a result.
I wish I could say I found it surprising, but it seem to me to be of a piece with too many other brutalities in American law. We pass a law with the best of intentions, and find it doesn’t work, and so we pass new regulations and policies designed to crack down on non-compliance, until we are brutalizing the population all out of proportion to the original good we were pursuing.
The important thing is to punish defiance.
UPDATE: Jim Treacher writes: “Punishing defiance is also probably why Percocet is mostly acetaminophen. It’s to make sure you don’t abuse the opiate, right? But now the FDA wants to ban it altogether because acetaminophen can cause liver damage. So let’s make people suffer in pain because of something that never needed to be done in the first place! . . . I wouldn’t wish the last 3 weeks of my life on anybody, let alone begrudge them some relief from the constant pain. Enough meddling in people’s lives. Enough nanny-state bullshit! That’s what doctors and patients are supposed to do, figure this stuff out. It’s just wrong to take that out of their hands.” Wrong, perhaps, but wonderfully productive of money and power.