The Formula

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And dozens of trucks had arrived full of trees. The newspaper reported that there was "good cheer at Bellevue."

“And then, a man came running into the emergency room.”

And he's screaming because he believes that Santa Claus has been chasing him for blocks with a baseball bat. Not long after that, he died, and then another person arrived in the emergency room, and then another. People are less struggling to breathe, they cannot see very well, they're acutely nauseated, they're suffering from terrible headaches, and many of them just collapse. They simply collapse on the spot and go into convulsions. This is journalist, Deborah Blum.

hallucinations were common to this, you know, what I'm going to call this sort of outbreak. So this was different than what they'd seen at the hospital before. Absolutely right.

I want to say, within that first night, they saw more than two dozen people within several days.

It's tripled and about a third of those people are dead by the time we get past Christmas. This started happening in emergency rooms around the city. You know, the numbers start ratcheting up in really a remarkable way, and the people come in to emergency rooms around the city, or, and this is the other thing that you start to see happening at this time, you start just finding bodies in the street. By New Year's Day, the refrigerators in Bellevue's morgue were full, and bodies were lined up in the hallways.

Over the next weeks and months, people kept dying. The same thing was happening across the country, and it was happening because the plan created by the U.S. government. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Eight years earlier, a doctor named Charles Norris, and a forensic chemist named Alexander

Gettler, had begun to worry that a huge problem was coming.

Charles Norris started seeing the early signs when he began working as the first official chief medical examiner of New York City in 1918.

Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler had started noticing reports coming in about people dying after a sudden onset of blindness, and then coma. Both symptoms of having ingested something called "would alcohol." Unlike the alcohol that we normally drink, which is made up of something called ethanol, "would alcohol" or "methanol" can be made by distilling wood.

To two very toxic compounds, one of which is formic acid and one of which is formaldehyde, and one of the really interesting things, if you're drinking "would alcohol" or "methanol" rather than ethanol, is that it tastes just the same.

“You get the same kind of buzz to it. That buzz disappears faster with wood alcohol. You're going to start feeling sick faster with wood alcohol, but that's going to take a few hours.”

You have this period in which if you think you're just drinking the regular good stuff and you're not, you're actually your body is beginning to metabolize this into some very bad things.

And you're really going to start at that point feeling not entirely in control.

“Two teaspoons of undeluded wood alcohol or "methanol" can make you go blind, and as little as an eighth of a cup can kill you.”

And about 1918, the government is like sending up warning bonfires everywhere that they're going to make alcohol illegal to drink. And the American people start figuring out ways so they can ensure that they still have alcohol at hand. And so people start setting up little apparatus or stills or ways to ferment organic material in their houses. They have backyard stills, they have basement stills, and to make the alcohol, I'm in New York City.

“I'm not exactly running out to Nebraska to harvest the little few golden waves of grain. I'm going to use the organic material at hand. So what's that going to be?”

I could start with if I have a garden, I can distill my garden, but a lot of times people were distilling what they had at hand, and sometimes it was their furniture, sometimes it was their shoes.

Sometimes they were sneaking into central park and breaking off a few branches and bringing home leaves. They actually weren't fully informed about just how dangerous this is. They just knew they could make something that would give them a buzz. So you started seeing the scattering of deaths related to these, you know, home distilling operations, putting whatever into them. Shoes, yes, they actually, and because think about it, it's leather, it's an organic material, people distill their shoes, and that's something to me about how much they were determined to drink no matter what.

What did Alexander Gettler and Charles Norse think about this coming prohibition? Oh, they were completely against it, and in fact, Gettler was publishing sort of warding statements in scientific journals in 1918 saying, this is a really bad idea, people are going to die, and the country is putting itself at risk by doing this, and they never left that platform. Both of them from the beginning said the people who are going to be most at risk or poor people without power, and that really mattered to both of them. I mean, Norse came from a wealthy family, the Norse who founded Norse town Pennsylvania, but Gettler, you know, was an immigrant, his parents were Hungarian immigrants, and he had put himself through, you know, his chemistry degree by working on a night ferry.

So you see this also infusing their sense of outrage, this is a program that is going to most harm, people who have no voice, little power and little money.

The night before prohibition went into effect in 1920, there were cocktail parties all around New York, people dressed up like they were going to a funeral with black top hats and veils, and drank in rooms draped in black fabric, with coffins to collect empty bottles. A lot of people went out and got dropped. We'll be right back to listen without ads, join criminal plus.

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Before prohibition went into effect, it was reported that some towns sold their jails.

“They believed that without alcohol, their citizens wouldn't commit any more crimes.”

Chewing gum and grape juice manufacturers predicted a jump in sales, and the salvation army opened bars that served buttermilk. Feeders expected big crowds of former drinkers, looking for something else to do. But after prohibition began on January 17, 1920, people just kept drinking. We were just the alcohol come from. So you have people doing their best to do that.

You have small scale, criminal enterprises making, you know, large, they have larger stills. And they distribute their illegal alcohol to illegal bars or spakeies, some of these were closets at the back of stores. But you have these really small, you know, operations quite often brewing up whiskeys that are really dangerous. A lot of people got creative to get around the rules of prohibition. In Oklahoma City one year, a man stumbled into a hospital.

He was barely able to walk. He told the doctor that he'd strained himself, working on a car, and had felt detingling in his calves. Then he lost control of his legs below the knee. In some ways, it looked like polio. But the patient didn't have any of the other symptoms like fever and difficulty swallowing.

Later that day, another man came in with the same strange paralysis. By the end of the day, three more patients with the same symptoms had arrived at the hospital. One of them was a podiatrist and told the doctor that he thought he'd caught this from his patients. Over the last few days, 65 of them had come to his office with the same symptoms. He gave the doctor a list.

The doctor started interviewing the patients. What was happening didn't seem to be an infectious disease. No children had been affected and very few women. But when the doctor asked the patients if they took any medicine, they all said they took something called Jamaican ginger, which was usually just called Jake.

Jake was an elixir that was supposed to help with stomach aches. It had a high alcohol content, but it was legal to sell during prohibition. As long as it contained a certain amount of a very bitter, solid material in it, which tasted terrible.

Some pharmacists had a back room where their customers could go drink it with a bottle of Coca-Cola to chase it down.

“Jake had been around for a while and no one had lost control of their legs.”

So doctors thought it must have been contaminated with something new. Within days, other cities across the country started having outbreaks. An investigator with the federal government's public health service started analyzing what was left in Jake bottles. He discovered that they contained a kind of plasticizer. Which attacks the nervous system in the same way ALS does.

Bootlakers had added it to the Jamaican ginger drink, along with castor oil, in place of the original solids, so that it would taste a little better, and still pass a prohibition agent's inspection. The condition it caused came to be known as Jake leg. There at least a dozen blue songs about it. It affected tens of thousands of people.

“At one point, a drink made with the alcohol from any freeze, became popular with train hoppers.”

They called it D-rail, because it got people very drunk, very quickly. It also killed people. And then you also see that the big, actually some of the more that big. But you know, sort of the criminal gangs that existed became much bigger because there were so much money in trafficking with illegal alcohol. The alcohols of the 1920s, the lucky Lucianos.

And they do this in two ways. One is, there's quite a trade and trying to smuggle in real alcohol across the Canadian border up from the Caribbean. Most of that is good alcohol, and that goes to their wealthy clients. That doesn't go to the poor, they're drinking sternum. And water, there was a cocktail in New York called Smoke. It was just a water stirred into sternum.

And then the other thing they do is they start stealing industrial alcohol. Industrial alcohol was still being manufactured. It was the stuff used in things like perfume and cleaning products. And a lot of it was ethanol, which you could drink. But manufacturers had been adding unpleasant or even toxic substances to it for years.

The government required them to do this denaturing process. If they didn't, manufacturers would have to pay liquor taxes. So you see these big criminal enterprises hiring their own chemists to try to detoxify the alcohol to the best of their ability. They don't really care if it is 100% good. It just has to be good enough that not all their clients are dropping dead on the spot.

And so the bootleg or chemists are finding all these ways to pull these additives out of the industrial alcohol. So that they can repackage it and sell it. And they do that fairly successfully.

“I think at one point during prohibition, like the big, I mean, we call them mafia now.”

But the big criminal gangs like alcohols were in total stealing about 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol a year.

Re-conditioning it as it were. And then selling it, dying it or flavoring it and selling it is very, yes. You know, full whisky. I mean, one of the things about prohibition is everything was whisky, right? There was no wine and beer and soft stuff, right? If you wanted to drink you drank hard stuff.

The bartenders at Speakeases covered up the taste by inventing new cocktails with strong flavors, like the bees' knees, with honey and lemon juice, or the south side with lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves and celtzer. One British visitor to New York Road. The Speakeases are a remarkable feature of the new American life. Every time you go for a drink, there's adventure.

You go to locked and chain doors. Eyes are considering you through peoples and the wooden walls. You sign your name in a book and receive a mysterious looking card with only a number on it. There may be a red signal light which can be operated from the door, in case of police demanding entrance. I was looking at one description of one of the Speakeases in New York,

and they always had a band start to play songs about the police whenever they spotted the government agencies in the Speakeases itself.

Some of the Speakeases would put stuffed animals at the center of the tables,

But they would raid, they raided Speakeases all the time, a lot of customers went to jail.

“One prohibition agent in New York, who called himself the city's champion who chunner,”

came up with all kinds of ways with his partner to get into Speakeases and collect evidence. One time one of them jumped into cold water, and the other rushed him into a bar, screaming at the man needed a drink before he froze to death. One of them liked to carry around a barrel of pickles. He said, "Who'd ever think a fat man with pickles was an agent?"

When they arrested a ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart,

they disguised themselves as football players.

They also pretended to be grave diggers, fishermen, street car conductors, and one of them even pretended to be an opera singer. He serenaded everyone in the Speakeasy before he shut it down. And so they're doing the sort of piecemeal prosecution. But what they weren't able to do was to get at the big centers of sort of where the industrial alcohol was going,

and where it was being detoxified, because that wasn't so easy to find. And so even though you have all these showy raids, well-publicized raids, you know,

“pictures of people going to jail, they actually weren't making that much of a dent, right?”

So this is really frustrating, the really pissed off.

You see them starting to say things like, you know, these people are choosing to be criminals, and so since they're choosing to be criminals, we don't owe them any particular support. And so they decide, since all of their, you know, on the ground boots on the ground enforcement isn't working, that what they can do is use chemical enforcement to make alcohol so dangerous that they won't drink it. The US government decided to poison industrial alcohol, which was, you know, the sort of base alcohol of prohibition at this point.

The government started experimenting with adding different substances that the bootlegger chemists might not be able to remove. And in the summer of 1926, the New York Times reported that it is admitted by prohibition enforcement authorities that Washington chemists are working on more deadly formulas to poison or denature alcohol, so that bootleggers cannot re-nature it and thus make it potable. They tried adding all kinds of things, including caracine and mercury by chloride, but still the bootlegger's chemists figured out how to get them out.

But the government chemists realize fairly quickly that the one poison they can't get out of the alcohol, you know,

“this sort of deliberately contaminated ethanol, is, is methanol, what alcohol?”

And despite all their bad efforts, they really can't get the methanol out into any meaningful amount. And so in 1926, the government actually comes up with a formula that's actually called formula N1. And at that point, you know, the amount of methanol used in industrial alcohol is, you know, one percent, two percent, it's really small. They ramp it up to formula N1 requires it being round up to five to ten percent. And at that amount, it becomes really, really, really poisonous.

And the bootlegger chemists are not able to get it out. And the bootleggers, they just put this on the market. We'll be right back. [ Music ] Support for criminal comes from bombas.

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By Christmas Eve, 1926, the industrial alcohol the government had poisoned had made its way into people's drinks. And in New York City, people were showing up at Bellevue Hospital, hallucinating, going blind and dying.

Nores and get learn. Know these people are being killed by messing up. And they were really ticked off.

“In the way I think that people who are public health officials working in a city in which their job is to try to save lives.”

And the federal government is taking lives. I mean, eventually, they just save those outright. On December 28th, Charles Norris issued a public statement. The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it.

And yet it continues its poisoning process. Headless of the fact that people determine to drink or daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poison liquor causes. A lawyer for the anti-Solun League issued a response and said that anyone who drank it is speak easy was in the same category as the man who walks into a drugstore, buys a bottle with a label on it marked poisonous and drinks the contents.

He said that the government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the constitution prohibits it. The Mayor of New York asked Charles Norris to review the alcohol deaths in the city. When Norris and his staff analyzed bottles, every single one had what alcohol. Norris wrote in his report, "There is practically no pure whiskey available anywhere in the city, and that there is actually no prohibition. All the people who drank before prohibition are drinking now, provided they are still alive."

This report pretty much says the US government is killing people. One Chicago Tribune editorial said, "Normally no American government would engage in such business. It would not, and does not set a trap gun and loaded the nails to catch a counterfitter. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the mail. It is only in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."

“I think the government, or at least the people who are putting this policy in place,”

originally they thought, I think, that if they just announced that the government was deliberately poisoned alcohol, people would say, "I'm not going to drink that. Why would I risk my life when I might be picking up more poisonous alcohol? I just want to drink." But to be fair, I don't think they realized how many people were going to drink anyway. Now, we're talking about a media ecosystem, has this information getting out?

The New York Times is covering it, but not everyone can afford a subscription to the New York Times.

I think a lot of the people who died post this government poisoning program, or people who just didn't know how dangerous it was.

That information wasn't getting into their communities. They were just trying to get through their days. They were not, you know, puddled around the radio or reading the warnings published in magazines or the newspapers of the day. And there are communities that don't trust the government for very good reason. So they also would have not entirely believed everything they were hearing.

And finally, you know, the government, which wants you to quit drinking, announces that they've made alcohol more dangerous.

“Well, sure. Right. Why wouldn't they try that on me?”

In 1928, Charles Norris issued a warning to New Yorkers that practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic. He did whatever he could to publicize what was happening. He announced every death from alcohol poisoning. He gave interviews and wrote articles. In one, he wrote, "Our national casualty list for the year from this one cause will outstrip the toll of the war."

These are the first fruits of prohibition. This is the price of our noble experiment in extermination.

And you've seen some very strong reactions, especially at the state level from state politicians just saying, "This has become insane." Right. We guess can't keep on murdering people. On December 19, 1930, the New York Times published an article with the headline, "Poison alcohol takes large toll." It quoted the director of the Treasury Department's Bureau of Industrial Alcohol saying that they were receiving reports of deaths and many parts of the country from poison as alcohol. Namely, industrial alcohol, manufactured under government supervision.

Then he announced that they expected to eliminate what alcohol from industrial alcohols.

“I think that there were some folks who at the government level became less and less comfortable with something that was increasingly being called murder by American newspapers.”

And so they still want to stop people from drinking, and so they started adding other compounds. They did a whole lot of work with different formulas to just make it smell bad and taste bad and try to put people off it that way. I'm trying to do chemical enforcement, but there's a kind of step back from the idea that the ultimate chemical enforcement is to make it so poisonous that the drinkers die. The Treasury Department actually had a press conference and had reporters come in and try some of the, you know, take shot glasses of some of the new formulas.

People have been drinking for longer than we know that people have existed, so to think that a government can just decide, you can't drink anymore and that it won't. She said it will work, it's pretty naive. Agreed. Prohibition lasted 13 years.

“It ended at 5.32pm on December 5th, 1933.”

In New York, hotel started rolling bar carts into lobbies, and blooming daels department store started selling bottles of port and whiskey at the moment the news came on the radio. The line went down the street. [Music] Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer, Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, and Lena Sellison. Our show is mixed in engineered by Veronica Seminetti. Julie Naukzanger makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at This is Criminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Deborah Blum's book, The Poisoner's Handbook, Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-H New York. You can sign up for a newsletter at this iscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program Criminal Plus.

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I'm Phoebe Judge, This is Criminal. It's almost over. It's quite hard to understand. No, it's not. It's my taste base.

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