When Sarah and I podcasted about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, we talked about the purpose of a giant tank of molasses. Those 2 million gallons of molasses weren’t being held so the good people of Boston could bake vast quantities of cookies. Rather, that massive tank of goo was needed to produce industrial alcohol to make munitions.

After the tank burst and covered Boston in waves of molasses, crews spent months trying to clean up the city. On one sticky day during cleanup, church bells began to ring, announcing that Prohibition was now in effect.

It’s easy to romanticize Prohibition — the days of glamorous danger, speakeasies, bootleggers and flappers. The idea of standing up to the government’s enforcement of morality is appealing as well, as those of us who live in states with blue laws (like Georgia) can attest. I always pick up a bottle of wine during my Sunday evening grocery shopping before realizing what day it is and putting it back on the shelf. But as Deborah Blum reminds us on Slate this week, Prohibition was deadly.

If the aim of Prohibition was to stop people from drinking, it failed spectacularly. If you had money, you could get alcohol smuggled into the country. And if you didn’t have money, you could purchase another product: industrial alcohol.

The alcohol you drink is distilled ethyl alcohol, or ethanol. Industrial alcohol is also distilled ethyl alcohol. What’s the difference? Industrial alcohol is sold for purposes other than drinking. It’s a money thing — the taxes are different. And since the government doesn’t like to be cheated on taxes, it made industrial alcohol undrinkable by altering the taste and mixing in some (poisonous) methyl alcohol.

If you were a Prohibition-era criminal who wanted to make money by selling illegal alcohol but it was too expensive to smuggle, what would you do? You’d make friends with a chemist who would “fix” that industrial alcohol for you, and you’d sell lots of it.

Until, that is, the government figured out this latest trickery and decided to put a stop to it — by adding more poison to the alcohol supply. Gasoline, formaldehyde (used for preserving dead bodies), acetone (used in nail polish remover), kerosene — all these chemicals and many more made their way into bootleg bottles. But it was the addition of much more methyl alcohol that sent dying men to the hospital.  By the end of Prohibition, thousands of U.S. citizens were dead from drinking alcohol poisoned by their own government. Most of them were poor — the rich, of course, could afford the good stuff.