At the start of Prohibition, New York City’s Bellevue Hospital treated about twelve annual cases of moonshine and wood alcohol poisoning. About a fourth of those were fatal. By 1926, the hospital treated 716 people for blindness and paralysis due to poisoned alcohol. The holiday season that year was especially deadly. On Christmas Day alone, 60 people were treated at Bellevue for alcohol poisoning and eight died from it. By New Year’s Day 1927, 41 people were dead.

Prohibition-era statistics are notoriously unreliable, but according to some estimates over 10,000 Americans died during Prohibition from the effects of drinking poisoned liquor, courtesy of both government and organized crime chemists. Many more were blinded. Prohibition’s attempt to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance, along with violence and crime. The solution the government had concocted to address alcohol abuse had made the problem worse.

Act of Betrayal

“There is no Prohibition,” New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said in an angry report about the alcohol deaths. “All the people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now — provided they’re still alive.”

Norris and his staff considered the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcohol an “act of betrayal.” They weren’t accustomed to having their national government adopt a policy known to kill people.

Policymakers in the 21st century have few such qualms about the opioid crisis. Nor does the media, which continues to parrot the government’s blatantly misleading propaganda, blaming illicit fentanyl and heroin deaths on prescription opioids. Just as thousands died from alcohol poisoning during Prohibition, opioid hysteria has had horrible consequences for millions of patients doomed to suffer torturous pain because of irresponsible journalism and the policy blunders it enables.

Many of the nation’s largest Prohibition-era newspapers, however, didn’t hesitate to condemn a government policy “gone haywire.”

“Prohibition in this area is a complete failure,” the New York Herald Tribune’s editorial page declared, “enforcement a travesty, the public a victim of poisonous liquor.” The Evening World said no administration had been more successful in “undermining the health of its own people,” while The St. Paul Pioneer Press called the government an “accessory to murder.”

Perhaps the Chicago Tribune stated it best: “It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.”

It’s a sentiment that applies just as aptly to today’s epidemic of opioid hysteria.