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Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

One of the program's most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, chief medical examiner of New York City in the 1920s, said it was "our national experiment in extermination." During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/pagenum/all/