"Modern-day snake oil" can blind you just as easily
Plus: How Anheuser-Busch built its biggest brand this century
One of the less glamorous aspects of Prohibition was that a lot of people got poisoned by bunk booze. As historian Dan Okrent wrote in his 2010 history Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (emphasis mine throughout):
Derelicts were poisoning themselves before Prohibition with alcohol of less than vintage quality […] But Prohibition stimulated the avarice of low-grade bootleggers, who extended their inventory of repurposed industrial alcohol with the addition of wood alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, and other toxic compounds, turning reports of paralysis and death into a newspaper staple.
Naturally, these consequences disproportionately befell the poor wretches who couldn’t afford Al Capone’s mark-ups on Sammy Bronfman’s fine Canadian liquors. In fact, to some of the more zealous Drys on the national scene, this was a feature, not a bug.1 Pretty fucked up?
Toxic drink hasn’t really been much of “a thing” in the US in the intervening century since Repeal. Despite its many well-documented ills, the country’s patchwork of state and federal alcohol regulations are actually fairly good at keeping actual poison out of the marketplace.2 You can see why beverage-alcohol firms would embrace this type of regulation, too. For one thing, it kneecaps (ahem) organized crime, and turns millions of home-cooking “competitors” into customers, clearing the board for commodification and consolidation. At a more basic level, it also ensures the American drinking public remains confident enough that their drinks won’t blind them to keep drinking.
This month, right after voters chose the presidential candidate that has promised to destroy the federal regulatory state, we got a a vision of what the American drinking public will lose if Trump 2.0 succeeds where Trump 1.0 failed.