The Formula

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On Christmas Eve in 1926, the New York Times reported that the shops were crowded.

There were more visitors than usual for the season.

And at Bellevue Hospital, limousines had delivered hundreds of gifts for the patients from the Astro family.

And dozens of trucks had arrived full of trees.

The newspaper reported that there was, quote, 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, there were 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 Getler,

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 Getler 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 wood alcohol.

Unlike the alcohol that we normally drink,

which is made up of something called ethanol, wood alcohol or methanol,

can be made by distilling wood.

And with wood alcohol, which has a different chemical formula,

what happens when you drink it is that instead of metabolizing it away

to really harmless compounds, our body metabolizes wood alcohol

in a very different way 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 wood alcohol,

or methanol rather than ethanol, is that it tastes just the same.

You get the same sort 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, your body is beginning to metabolize this into some very bad things.

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

Two teaspoons of undeluted 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 a little few golden waves of grain.

I'm going to use the organic material at hand.

So what's that going to be?

I can 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 you know, 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 Getler and Charles Norris think about this coming prohibition?

Oh, they were completely against it.

And in fact, Getler was publishing sort of warning 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, Norris came from a wealthy family, the Norris, who founded Norris Town, Pennsylvania, in fact.

But Getler, 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 drunk.

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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.

Theaters expected big crowds of former drinkers looking for something else to do.

But after prohibition began on January 17th, 1920, people just kept drinking.

Where does the alcohol come from?

Well, some of it, like I said, is home brew.

So you have people doing their best to do that.

You have sort of small scale criminal enterprises making.

They have larger stills.

And they distribute their illegal alcohol to illegal bars or speakeasies.

Some of these were closets at the back of stores.

So, but you have these really small operations quite often brewing up whiskies 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 a tingling 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.

But still, people drank it for the liquor.

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's bottles.

He discovered that they contained a kind of plasticizer,

which attacks the nervous system in the same way ALS does.

Bootleckers 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 blues songs about it.

It affected tens of thousands of people.

At one point, a drink made with the alcohol from Annie Freeze

became popular with train hoppers.

They called it D-Rail, because it got people very drunk, very quickly.

It also killed people.

Then you also see that the big...

Actually, some of them weren't that big,

but the criminal gangs that existed became much bigger,

because there was so much money in trafficking with a legal alcohol.

The Alcapones of the 1920s, the Lucky Lucianos.

They do this in two ways.

One is there's quite a trade in 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 isn't going to the poor.

They're drinking sturnow and water.

There was a cocktail in New York called Smoke

that was just a water stirred into sturnow.

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 bootlegger 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 Al Capone

were in total stealing about 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol

a year, reconditioning it as it were,

and then selling it, dying it, or flavoring it,

and selling it as various, you know, foul whiskies.

I mean, what are the things about prohibition as 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 Speakeezies 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 seltzer.

One British visitor to New York wrote,

the Speakeezies are a remarkable feature of the new American life.

Every time you go for a drink, there's adventure.

You go to locked and chained doors.

Eyes are considering you through peep holes in 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 Speakeezies in New York

and they always had a band start to play songs about the police

whenever they spotted the government agencies in the Speakeezie itself.

Some of the Speakeezies would put stuffed animals

at the center of the tables and if they saw the police,

they'd put them under the table so that people knew.

But they would raid.

They raided Speakeezies all the time.

A lot of customers went to jail.

One prohibition agent in New York who called himself the city's

champion hooch hunter came up with all kinds of ways

with his partner to get into Speakeezies and collect evidence.

One time one of them jumped into cold water

and the other rushed him into a bar screaming that 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 an 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 speak easy before he shut it down.

And so they're like doing this sort of piecemeal prosecution

but that 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 bootleger 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 kerosene and mercury by chloride.

But still the bootleggers chemists figured out how to get them out.

But the government chemists realized fairly quickly

that the one poison they can't get out of the alcohol,

you know, this sort of deliberately contaminated ethanol

is methanol with alcohol.

And despite all their best 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, it's actually called Formula One.

And at that point, you know, the amount of methanol

used in industrial alcohol is, you know, 1%, 2%,

and it's really small.

They ramp it up to, Formula One requires it being ramped up

to 5% to 10%.

And at that amount, it becomes really, really, really poisonous.

And the bootleggers chemists are not able to get it out.

And the bootleggers, they just put this on the market.

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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 Belleview Hospital,

hallucinating, going blind, and dying.

Norris and Geltler know these people are being killed

by mess and all, and they were really ticked off, right?

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 say this outright.

On December 28, 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,

heedless of the fact that people determined to drink

are 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-Saloon League issued a response

and said that anyone who drank at a 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 wood alcohol.

Norris wrote in his report,

there is practically no pure whiskey available anywhere

in the city, and that there's 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,

quote, normally no American government

would engage in such business.

It would not, and does not,

set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch a counter-fitter.

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, oh, I'm not going to drink that.

Why would I risk my life when I might be picking up

more poisonous alcohol, I just won't 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.

How's this information getting out?

The New York Times is covering it,

but not everyone can afford a subscription

to the New York Times.

You have a whole class of people

who actually can't afford a newspaper subscription.

I think a lot of the people who died

post this government poisoning program

were 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 huddled around the radio

or reading the warnings,

publish 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, 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 Norse issued a warning to New Yorkers

that practically all the liquor

that is sold to 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 see some very strong reactions,

especially at the state level

from state politicians just saying

that 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

in many parts of the country

from Poisonous Alcohol,

namely industrial alcohol manufactured

under government supervision.

Then he announced that they expected

to eliminate wood 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.

So they're still trying to do chemical enforcement,

but there's a kind of step back

from the idea that, you know,

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.

You know, 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...

Yes.

...is that it will work. It's pretty naive.

Agreed.

Prohibition lasted 13 years.

It ended at 5.32 p.m. on December 5, 1933.

In New York, hotel started rolling bar carts into lobbies

and Bloomingdale's department store

started selling bottles of port and whiskey

at the moment the news came on the radio.

The line went down the street.

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 Sajiko, Lily Clark,

and Lena Silason.

Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti.

Julie Alexander makes original illustrations

for each episode of Criminal.

You can see them at ThisIsCriminal.com

or we'll also have a link to Deborah Blum's book,

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