100 years ago, the US tried to ban alcohol, and the result was a crime wave like never before seen in the USA.

Al Capone shot to fame and fortune, but he was just one of many. And the illegal alcohol trade became big business with violent turf wars and a government response that was as violent as the gangs, leading to shootouts in the streets. Ultimately, the US government became so desperate that they started releasing deliberately poisoned alcohol to scare people away from drinking. Slate reports this sordid chapter of American prohibition history this way: Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had 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. Although mostly forgotten today, the chemist’s war of prohibition remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, “It was our national experiment in extermination.