Chemist versus Chemist: the US Prohibition Experiment

By Michelle Xu, January 14, 2018

Applied chemistry faced a rough time in the early 20th century. Many of its synthesized children, like mustard gas and phosgene, held infamous roles in the European trenches of World War I. In the United States, notorious poisons such as arsenic and thallium were mixed into common household products and sold to average consumers.

Chemistry also played a major role in U.S. Prohibition—by helping take the lives of countless drinkers. Beginning with the ratification of the 18th amendment, Prohibition was a period from 1920 to 1933 when moral crusaders, convinced of alcohol’s evils, amassed enough political power to ban the production, sale, and transport of these “intoxicating liquors.” Unsurprisingly, this new legislation gave birth to a sprawling black market for alcohol. Bootleggers opened speakeasies that sold moonshine on the down-low, but the quality of these new spirits was highly questionable.

During Prohibition, illegal liquor was often made from distilling industrial alcohol, which was not explicitly banned. The government employed chemists to create around 70 different “denaturing” formulas for these industrial products that mixed deadly methyl alcohol to otherwise potable ethyl alcohol. Hundreds of speakeasy goers lost their vision, if not their lives, drinking what was basically straight poison. After all, half a cup of methyl alcohol is enough to kill the average man.

In addition to methyl alcohol, Prohibition-era drinkers risked finding even nastier ingredients mixed into their “gin.” Starting 1926, the government chemists trotted out ten new formulas that included such compounds as chloroform, formaldehyde, gasoline, nicotine, mercury bichloride, mercury salts, benzene, kerosene, pyridine, cadmium, iodine, zinc, ether, camphor, carbolid acid, quinine, acetone, and brucine (a cousin of strychnine). Even if you’re not in Course 5, many of these substances should sound familiar from their prominence in Agatha Christie novels.

The bootleggers, however, had money too and employed their own host of chemists to combat these new government formulas. Their lackeys figured out how to distill the lethal mercury bichloride out of Formula #6 in the spring of 1926. Formulas #3 and #4 were gone by September. Nevertheless, in 1926, there were more than 1,200 cases of sickness and blindness from poisonous alcohol in New York City alone.

The bootleggers didn’t just take chemicals out—sometimes they added them in. Before Prohibition, the patent medicine Jamaican Ginger, or Ginger Jake, was basically ginger-flavored ethyl alcohol. Then starting in 1920, the government mandated that Ginger Jake contain less alcohol and more random solid material, which prompted many sellers to get creative with substances like creosote and carbolic acid.

Ginger Jake became particularly infamous, however, when two men from Boston, Harry Gross and Max Reisman, conned an MIT chemist to create a compound that boosted the solid material but did not detract from the ginger taste. What he gave them was tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate, or TOCP, which is a plasticizer and neurotoxin. As a result, around 2000 people in the South and Southwest, where Ginger Jake was popular, suffered from paralysis and lost control of their hands and feet. “Jake leg” and its characteristic tapping walk became a common medical issue, and ended up being featured in many blues songs of the era like “Jake Bottle Blues.”

American Prohibition was ultimately a fierce chemist-versus-chemist battlefield. The victims were the U.S. people, and all parties had blood on their hands. The government was killing its own people in the name of so-called morality, while bootleggers were profiting off the blinding and paralysis their customers. Thank goodness that chemistry has now left all of that horrid business behind.

References

Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Penguin Press, 2011.