How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition (2010) | Hacker News Reader

How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition (2010)

slate.com

108 pointscalcsam65 comments

I debated this ~4 years ago on the Penn State University Parliamentary Debate team. During the practice session I tried to use this as an argument against the claimed moral high ground of the prohibitionists.

It failed; our coach and the rest of the team we're able to prove to me, with a more careful reading of the article (and checks from other primary source material) that there was never a "Federal Poisoning Program" and that most of the deaths resulted from a lack of communication with those looking to drink while alcohol was illegal.

On both of those points:

- 1) Only industrial alcohol was legal to produce during prohibition. Industrial alcohol contains methanol, a compound that can cause blindness and death. It takes a good amount of skill and refinement to remove all traces of methanol from alcohol to make it ready for human consumption - a step that the legal distillers had no reason at the time to take (and would have in fact had them closed down for bootlegging)

- 2) The Federal Government never added poison (methanol) to alcohol made by bootleggers - had they found the bootleggers, they would have destroyed their stills and jailed them, not poisoned their stock, brought it to market, and sold it. I believe[citation needed] only about 10% of the alcohol produced by the bootleggers was contaminated in any way, and even less caused 'permanent damage' beyond what you would expect from people drinking alcohol.

- 3) The order to add methanol to industrial alcohol is historically dubious... All of the citations I can find for it in the searchable web (read: Google) links back to the original Slate article. Supposedly, the article is based on this Article in Nature[1]. From the abstract, it is more likely that the mass of laws and policies that followed the ratification of the 18 amendment included an understanding that industrial alcohol should be exempt but rendered purposely undrinkable - which it already was.

I am personally against prohibition, and against the government attempting to mandate morality; but I fear that this article is popular because of its anti-government attitudes - but you could only come to the conclusion that there was ever a "Federal Poisoning Program" if you give perfect foresight agency to every policy the government passes....

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a...

There is a reason that it's called "denatured alcohol". It's because something is added to it to make it unsuitable for consumption. The Volstead Act (establishing prohibition) makes repeated references to "bonded denaturing plants":

http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.h...

It also mentions 'Denatured alcohol or denatured rum produced and used as provided by laws and regulations now or hereafter in force.', so I'm sure there is some text somewhere describing the processes.

There is often methanol in fermented mash, but if you have a working still, the sophisticated method of getting rid of it is to discard the early fraction of the distillation. It probably isn't a large amount of methanol (but there's probably other assorted things not to drink).

Edit: Here's the IRS guidance issued in association with the 1906 law that created "industrial alcohol" by not taxing denatured alcohol:

http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B...

This page talks about adding methyl alcohol "in the presence and under the direction of an authorized Government officer":

http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B...

Apparently for use in cars, because it was cheaper than gasoline.

Right!

Though: Heads and tails recycling of the mash is more complicated than simply 'discarding' the heads to avoid methanol.

Bootleggers usually weren't using a fractional still, and thus would have needed precise temperature and timing to even attempt to measure methanol concentrations.

Furthermore their supply of grain, being an illegal operation, was (probably) sub-par; any rot or mold on grain to be distilled greatly increases the chances of producing methanol.

Again, I think only ~10% of the alcohol by bootleggers was contaminated. Distilling has been around for a long time, but the effects of driving it underground greatly reduced quality and increased the chances of going blind or dying due methanol poisoning.

I think I'm railing against It takes a good amount of skill and refinement to remove all traces of methanol from alcohol to make it ready for human consumption - a step that the legal distillers had no reason at the time to take (and would have in fact had them closed down for bootlegging).

The legal distillers (or distributors, whatever) were actively adding significant amounts of methanol, not just avoiding some process for removing it.

> "actively adding significant amounts of methanol"

That's the claim currently being debated. The parent claims to have researched and been unable to find any legitimate source, and further claims to have uncovered where the misunderstanding came from. If you wish to refute him, you'll need to do better than merely assert your position -- you'll need to provide a legitimate source, with specific quotes and page numbers / paragraph numbers / other citation markings so we can see exactly where the "actively adding" claim comes from.

Read my initial comment! I edited it some, but that was well before you weighed in here.

I already did what you asked for, providing a link to an IRS document from the 1910s or so describing adding methanol in the presence of an authorized government agent.

You linked to a book that's over 50 pages and contains hundreds of laws. Provide specific quotes and page numbers, please.

The one quote you seem to be basing your argument on basically said that already-produced beverage-grade alcohol could be sold if it was mixed with something else to make it undrinkable. That doesn't imply (as you seem to think it does) that newly-made alcohol was being mixed with methanol, only that previously-distilled alcohol could be reused instead of destroyed.

And that definitely doesn't imply that the government was intentionally poisoning bootleg alcohol.

The first paragraph of my last link is wildly specific, referencing a law about denatured alcohol passed in 1906. I read it as talking about freshly distilled alcohol having stuff added to it, with a specific mention of methyl alcohol. Maybe explain how you don't see that there.

I responded to the obvious confusion in the initial post about what "industrial alcohol" is. I'm not trying to establish that the government ramped up the poisons during prohibition (although I wouldn't be surprised if people involved with the denaturing were intentionally using nasty shit with no official government program backing it).

Ahh, I now understand the specifics of your claim.

It appears you are correct that (prior to prohibition) one could produce alcohol and then intentionally add non-drinkable substances that matched its industrial use and therefore not be taxed for producing drinkable alcohol. And, as you say, this doesn't establish anything specific to prohibition, such as an intentional ramping up of poisons.

Which means the initial claim of the article still appears to be completely unsupported.

> If you wish to refute him, you'll need to do better than merely assert your position -- you'll need to provide a legitimate source, with specific quotes

Why? What's making JasonCEC more trustworthy than Slate? He didn't do any of the things you're asking maxerickson to do either. I see this having happened:

1. Deborah Blum, without any backing, claimed to have researched and found legitimate sources claiming that in 1926 the Coolidge administration decided to make denatured alcohol more virulent.

2. JasonCEC, without any backing, claimed to have researched and failed to find any such evidence.

3. maxerickson took exception.

It takes nothing other than the power to surf the internet to do everything JasonCEC did. Accordingly, it's not really necessary to give what he said any weight at all. Why isn't an unbacked, citeless refutation at least as strong as JasonCEC's original argument?

> "Why?"

because.

...

OK, seriously though: because the specific question is whether the government intentionally added methanol or other substances to alcohol with the intent to poison people who were drinking it during prohibition. "JasonCEC, please cite the lack of evidence you found" is nonsensical. "Those who are claiming it happened, please cite specific, original documentation" is reasonable.

(To be fair, max does not appear to be making the specific claim regarding prohibition; he's making a more technical claim about denaturing alcohol based on a law from 2 decades prior.)

> because the specific question is whether the government intentionally added methanol or other substances to alcohol with the intent to poison people who were drinking it during prohibition. "JasonCEC, please cite the lack of evidence you found" is nonsensical

I originally made this point:

1. But JasonCEC hasn't addressed the question in any way. He's claimed to have researched it. That's not the same as having researched it.

I could make a couple more:

2. If you go looking into the question of whether a historical event happened, there are plenty of ways to show evidence that it didn't. People arguing the ahistoricity of Jesus don't say "well, it's impossible to cite a lack of evidence", they do things like pointing out that the non-Christian historians who mention him do so only in known forgeries, and that certain historians who you'd think would have taken note, like one who specifically wrote about religious movements in Asia, seem to have overlooked him, and they compare the state of the evidence for Jesus with the state of the evidence for other notable figures of the same time period. Discrediting the idea that something happened isn't impossible, or in principle even difficult.

3. If one person says "I've looked into it, and I found strong evidence for X", and a second person says "I too have looked into it, and I didn't find evidence for X", that's quite compatible with X having happened. We've all looked for something that was there and not found it.

4. You're calling for applying very strict standards to one side of an argument while implicitly trusting the other side -- based on the word of a guy you don't know who has made not even a token effort to comply with your standards. This doesn't make any sense. If drunken finger-pointing and mumbled arguments are an acceptable attack, they're an acceptable defense too.

> "We've all looked for something that was there and not found it."

which is why it's important for those who claim there is strong evidence to present it.

Note that I'm not expressing any specific trust in one side of this argument. I'm simply asking the side claiming to have evidence to post it. max has posted his evidence about the general denaturing process (which I initially misunderstood and would retract my criticism if I hadn't passed the editing cutoff.) Thus far, I have seen no evidence regarding a specific ramping up of "poisoning" during prohibition.

I responded with the specific historical evidence that point 3 hand waved to not exist specifically because it was such an odd claim to make. I didn't respond to it because I thought the point was particularly debatable (in my mind, just quickly looking at that document was pretty damning to point 3...).

Methanol was used before, during and after prohibition, and it continues to be used today. Pretty much any decent reference will be very clear about denaturing ethanol with methanol (Wikipedia takes 5 words to wink at the fact, using "methylated spirits" as a synonym for denatured alcohol. One paragraph later it says "The main additive has traditionally been 10% methanol").

Calling that particular fact "historically dubious" insinuates something about the other claims in the article, but I sort of think that the author (a "professor of science journalism") went further than "the googles" in their attempts to gather information. I'm sure they read the medical examiner reports that they claim exist. I'm sure the reports are real. I guess I'll read the book, because I'd like a clearer picture of what was going on.

> I'm sure there is some text somewhere describing the processes

http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/27/part-19/subpart-O

http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/27/part-20

http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/27/part-21

Point 1 is false point 2 is true and point 3 seems to contradict itself.

1) When distilling, it is quite easy to remove methanol as it has a different boiling point. The presence of significant amounts of methanol in the first place is plausible, but not necessary (If you ferment plain sugar, for example you are unlikely to get methanol).

3) "The order to add methanol to industrial alcohol is historically dubious ... industrial alcohol should be exempt but rendered purposely undrinkable" The "mass of laws and policies" to make industrial alcohol purposely undrinkable is the same thing as an order to poison industrial alcohol. They made it undrinkable by poisoning it.

Point 1 is not false;

I work in Quality Control for artisan distillers - heads and tails recycling is an important part of the production process, and requires both skill and testing to make sure methanol is removed from the spirit.

A bootlegger would need 1) a fractional still or 2) precise temperature control and monitoring - they were unlikely to have either.

Furthermore, I find it doubtful that an illegal bootlegger would have used pure sugar for their mash - that would have been far more expensive than the purchase of grain.

Finally, on point 1, the foresight and knowledge to remove methanol doesn't come in a nice pamphlet with the illegal still - we know that a lot of the alcohol produced by the illegal bootleggers (who the government did not have control over) was contaminated with methanol (And other heavy metals or contaminants).

On point 3; Sure... that's almost right...

Industrial alcohol not made for human consumption would already contain methanol and other contaminants; the law establishing a minimum level of contaminants to render it undrinkable by humans did theoretically make it more harmful.

That does not constitute a "Federal Poisoning Program". - when someone hears those words, they don't think "the government established that already undrinkable industrial alcohol must contain a minimum level of naturally occurring contaminants to stop individuals from consuming it";

they think "the government purposely added poison to alcohol sold to individuals for consumption" - which is not what happened.

> heads and tails recycling is an important part of the production process, and requires both skill and testing to make sure methanol is removed from the spirit.

The tails contain no methanol so we can ignore them for this conversation. If you have a reasonable estimation of the amount of methanol in your mash, then throwing out enough of the head takes neither skill nor testing. Without that knowledge you need either a moderate amount of skill (to determine when methanol is coming out of your still) or the ability to test for methanol, but not both. I have done this myself and spoken with multiple people who have done it. It sounds like you are talking about re-distilling your heads and tails to get every last drop of ethanol out of them. This can be done safely with skill and testing, but is not necessary by any stretch of the imagination.

You can make a good argument that what they did does not constitute a "Federal Poisoning Program" as they did not intend to poison people. I am not arguing in favor of that term, but I know from personal experience that separating out methanol from ethanol is not particularly difficult. The same criteria that make a still good at separating ethanol from water make it good at separating methanol from ethanol.

>Finally, on point 1, the foresight and knowledge to remove methanol doesn't come in a nice pamphlet with the illegal still

Correct. If foresight and knowledge to remove methanol was universal, no one would have suffered methanol poisoning.

>we know that a lot of the alcohol produced by the illegal bootleggers (who the government did not have control over) was contaminated with methanol

We do not know this. It is possible given that are records are not great, but my guess is that this is false given the low quantities of methanol generally produced by yeast and the ease with which it can be removed. Heavy metal and other contamination seems much more likely (though I would expect them to be quite rare as well).

As for industrial ethanol including methanol, some of it probably would without a law requiring it, but that would certainly not be universal. Do you believe that without the law requiring contamination that they would not have sold uncontaminated ethanol?

>they think "the government purposely added poison to alcohol sold to individuals for consumption" - which is not what happened.

The government did not purposely added poison to alcohol intended for consumption. They did however require the addition of poison to alcohol that was later sold for consumption.

The "Federal Poisoning Program" is still in force currently in 27 CFR 19 - 21 as posted by esbranson.

Industrial alcohol can contain numerous optional denaturants other than methanol, here is the latest regulation according to Cornell, showing specific denaturants and their applicable formula Nos.:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151

Among these are the SD Alcohols (SDA or Specially Denatured Alcohols) seen in shampoos and other cosmetics.

Many of these denaturants are intended to be nearly impossible to remove from the product, others not as difficult or costly to separate.

The federal government did not need to add poison to alcohol made by bootleggers, it was already present in the hijacked SDAs and CDAs the bootleggers were using as raw material.

Depending on sophistication, bootleggers (sometimes) were removing (some of) the denaturant before clandestinely distributing their material for beverage use.

EDIT: I have single-handedly tested billions of dollars worth of industrial alcohols, and methanol is one of the big ones around here. Today methanol purity (assay) is performed internationally according to the instrumental technique that I personally developed on my own decades ago and held in confidence for years before it "leaked" from the lab.

Purty good at beverage grade too, considering work for a craft distiller presently.

Also lived in two counties with borders delineated by rivers such that an island in the river was not in either county, which allowed plausible deniability for local law enforcement during prohibition. One of these islands at one time being owned by Al Capone.

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Last Call: Rise and Fall of the Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent. There is a PBS documentary as well, but I found it difficult to watch (narration with lots of panning over still photos).

The prohibition is a really great example of the unintended consequences of (mostly well-intentioned) morality-by-legislation.

You mean the Ken Burns' documentary? Panning over still photos is sort of his thing. iPhoto even has a slideshow mode called, appropriately enough, "Ken Burns".

Prohibition is excellent, by the way, I recommend you give it another chance.

That book is fantastic. I came here to recommend it.

“Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.”

While I have a somewhat hard time believing the basic premise of this article in general, this statement makes no sense.

What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions, and a policy which(granted in this case with dubious proof) causes the exact same deadly-bad decisions?

> What is the difference between a tax which is severe enough to have people make deadly-bad decisions

Well, for some people, that is any taxe above 0%.

>They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States

reminded about "almost Prohibition" of 30 years ago in USSR which resulted in many hard-drinking/alcoholics people extracting alcohol from various industrial and domestic liquids containing it, up to and including shoe polish, and moonshiners producing their product from unimaginable things because of limited availability of various food-grade (or at least looking/smelling like it) sugars/starches and adding things like domestic insecticide for better "kick" (or "torgue" as it is said in Russian)

I think looking at the DNA of many Russians today, one can see what was drunk back then by their parents :)

Shoe polish? You had shoe polish? Honestly, some people don't know they're born. When I were a lad, we used to make our vodka out of chairs.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=samogon+taburetka

(With apologies to a Russian friend of mine who said this about turnips.)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964731 (147 points, 589 days ago, 97 comments)

The gov't still poisons alcohol. You can go to your local bardware store and buy denatured alcohol. Since you can't drink, it's not taxed.

I think this article is making this into something sinister when it wasn't.

Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. Maybe they put some new chemical nobody heard of into it. Anyway, people are drinking it and getting sick and dying from it left and right.

The motor oil is normally for cars, but the increased sales as a recreational drink is boosting sales. You try to prohibit people from drinking motor oil, but they do it anyway. So you go to the motor oil factory and make the motor oil significantly more poisonous.

People have been dying from this normally, but now faster than ever because the motor oil makes you gag and puke, but they force it down anyway because YOLO.

I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous. Addiction increases cognitive dissonance, making people adhere to incomplete and inaccurate models in order to justify making a villian where none exists and making a victim where none exists.

That's lame analogy. Alcohol can kill when consumed to excess, but you find no fault in killing people because they consume a drug that you disapprove of?

Alcohol is still denatured, you know. I think they just made it taste bad instead of making it poisonous. The intent was not for people to drink it but for people to avoid diversion (using industrial alcohol as drinking alcohol).

No, it's still poisonous, because it contains the head of distillation, which contains methanol which would be discarded in alcohol made for human consumption. Yes, they add other denaturants to make it taste foul as well. However there are still a few cases of serious alcoholics who try to drink methylated spirit.

Amusingly, the treatment for methanol poisoning is to get the patient drunk with the good stuff, although this is usually done under medically-induced coma with a purified ethanol drip. The ethanol competes with the methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme, reducing the rate at which methanol is broken down in the body into really poisonous formic acid. There was a case in 2007 where a hospital ran out of medical ethanol, and substituted vodka in a drip while treating poisoning with ethylene glycol, which has the same treatment. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm

There was a really cool speaker at HopeX that talked about it. I can't find the link to the video right now.

I don't disapprove of drinking poison. Its the people drinking poison who are disapproving of the decision to make poison poisonous. The phenomenon to explain is why the blame is quickly shifted from people drinking poison and getting hurt, to intelligent people who allowed it to continue.

Its part of the "shift blame onto the non idiots" agenda in america. Someone get hurt by being stupid? Then find the nearest responsible person and make him pay up to remedy everything.

I've got a better idea. How about we laugh at the idiots being idiots and try to encourage the poisoners to at least ratchet up their poisoning poison more slowly. As to make the dying idiots once again the responsible party by choosing to get hurt by drinking poison.

Per the article, the people drinking it were more often than not poor (as the rich could afford "the good stuff").

But they weren't purchasing denatured alcohol knowingly, they were buying booze from people who were selling them "alcohol".

Your compassion is awe inspiring.

Edit: your username is very appropriate.

My compassion is earned by the victim at hand, not given away by individuals who like to appropriate other men's resources such as yourself.

Where did pstuart say anything about "appropriat[ing] other[s'] resources"? What really motivates your obvious visceral disdain for alcohol?

The fact that its addictive and damages people. That should be the illegal thing: using a factory to make things that people get addicted to and it harms them.

People 1000 years from now are going to look at us in the way we look at witch trials. Likt wtf bro? Why don't you go making bombs that get set off on a hair trigger and just lay them around? They only hurt once in a while if you get them close to your face.

Wtf really? Well you see, it was addictive! And... We really liked it! mmm hmmm. I can think of better defenses for the witch trials.

My mother was an alcoholic and her abuse of it killed her. Millions of other people are able to use it responsibly.

Would you care to dance around and laugh and sing "ha ha, your mommy's dead and the bitch deserved it!" Because that's the tune you're carrying.

Today we have an obesity epidemic that is responsible for significant health problems. By your logic all food should be poisoned too. You are one sick fucker.

So let me get this straight, your mom died from alcohol and I still here you defending it? I guess I tripped your cognitive dissonance algorithms, your genetic line can't simultaneously be 'good' and the thing that caused great damage in it also good. So the defective party must be the one pointing out the truth in the situation.

So do you want to spray cannabis with poison?

How about genetically engineering cannabis so that consuming it causes a pink polka dotted tumor to grow on your forehead to facilitate easy identification of cannabis users?

Poisoning people is a perversion of science.

It should be legalized and then if you take it, it goes on your record, so next time you try to get a job the hiring company can decide based upon the reputation of potheads, whether or not to hire you.

Why the fuck is it any of their business what I do in my free time?

Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now.

Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.

How exactly does smoking marijuana send you to the emergency room? Oh it must be one of those super common overdoses we hear about.

He's a troll with a superiority complex.

Well, there was that misleading USA today chart [0] that pointed out there are more ER visits related to marijuana than heroin.

Of course, when you adjust for the number of users the rate drops to lower than the rate for alcohol (duh).

[0]: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/2/5960307/marijuana-legalization-h...

Should I not bike in my free time, because I might hit a pothole, endo, and break my arm? That would march "[my] sorry butt" into "[your] emergency room" pretty darn quick.

The answer is: that's absurd. Every single thing humans do can result in injury. (Even sitting in a chair injures you!) Cycling probably sends more people to the emergency room than smoking pot does, in fact.

(I don't use marijuana BTW, but I do support its legalization. Sounds like a legitimate recreational activity. I personally prefer coffee.)

That actually did kinda happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat#.22Paraquat_pot.22

"I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous."

Please tell me you're being sarcastic here. Because otherwise I have no idea how to begin a coherent reply. It's as if I'm suddenly confronted with someone adamantly arguing that the sun is pink, or that cars grow on trees.

You know an argument is good when the opposing party resorts to ad hominem. First you must explain where I have made a mistake, you pea brain.

The person adding poison with the intent of killing people is responsible for the people he kills.

I don't think that's what ad hominem means.

Cross between ad hominum and straw man. He compared my argument to cars growing on trees the said ha! Look how silly you are. Cars don't grow on trees!

Hmmm you don't say. Can we get back to the argument now?

>ad hominem

I think the term you are looking for is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule

While I get what you are saying.... this was done knowing what the results were going to be - done specifically to get the results (dangerously poisoning people who's behaviour was determined to not be moral)

So yeah - I do believe the guilty party are those that knowly made something that was going to poison and kill people.

On the "alcohol" is poison argument (WTF?) Fine - it turned from a known poison with known, acceptable results to something that that wasn't known and killed people.

If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected.

I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want.

1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises.

2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer

Except that in the vast majority of people alcohol is a health benefit. Drinkers live longer than non drinkers.

Health benefit? I'll be sure to tell the kids who's mothers drank during pregnancy that their obvious and life crippling birth defects that nugget of truthiness.

Tell me again how much alcohol stimulates GDP and promotes health in our emergency rooms? To the tune of negative 120 billion annually and overloaded emergency rooms treating throngs of out of work alcoholics needing treatment for alcohol related problems?

Health benefits. Yeah right. Sure you get a dollar, but you lose 1000. Look at the big picture.

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/NEDS&NIS-DRM9/NEDS&NI...

This says it's about a 10th of the cost of what you said.

While I regardless agree with you that alcoholism is a problem, your solutions are not only draconian, they are demonstrably ineffective. We've tried them before. They don't work. This isn't about morality, it's about what works.

Please stop spreading this myth.

The group of people who don't drink includes a bunch of very ill people, so it's not surprising to find that group dies sooner than the other group. That doesn't mean that alcohol has any health benefit.

Every doctor I've ever had has recommended that I have 2 drinks a day. "Heart healthy and liver neutral." Is that BS? Totally willing to hear that it is, especially if you have a source.

Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive.

The logical approach in this case would be the make the firm halt their motor-oil enhancing activity, not to let them keep doing it and adding your own poison. This is a silly analogy.

Suppose you're driving a car and have a crash, and the car detects that you weren't wearing a seat belt. Instead of deploying the air bag, swords and knives shoot out of the dashboard and seat. You were breaking the law, so the car manufacturer and the government can't be blamed. Never mind that the entire point of the law was to protect you, you were breaking the damn law.

An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage.

Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.

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