Fine example of a product of prohibition of the 30's: "The Jake Walk" -- a permanent, crippling disease that afflicted 50,000 Americans

The 'funnest' example is how the Feds forced poisoning of industrial alcohol.

Pure grain alcohol is used in a number of different industrial uses. Personally I keep a bottle of 'everclear' on hand because it's so useful for cleaning things and a good disinfectant, as well as a excellent fuel source for portable stoves. The only real problem with it is how expensive it is.

However by the early 1900's most of this stuff being sold is 'denatured' alcohol. This was done by adding unsavory chemicals to the alcohol in order to avoid paying the taxes on potable spirits. There was a pretty standard process for doing this that was well-known. Much of the time it was just by adding bitter tasting liquids or whatever.

During prohibition bootleggers would steal the 'denatured' alcohol and then hire chemists to 'renature' the alcohol.

The government figured this out and then ordered industries to secretly add more serious poisons to the industrial alcohol that would survive the re-distilling processes used by the bootleggers.

This ended up killing thousands and thousands of people.

The government used their deaths as propaganda to convince people as to why you should not trust bootlegged liquor.

nobody forced them to drink it