To broaden support for the war, Wilson partnered with the Prohibition movement. Prohibition advocates “indignantly insisted that … any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German,” noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol manufacture, sale, and transportation) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition itself was a public-health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s. To punish lawbreakers, the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often converted into drinkable hooch; 10,000 people were killed as a result. Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, noted that “an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.” It took more than half a century for the quality of American beer to recover from Prohibition. And the effects of the booster shot that organized crime received in those years lasted even longer. Even worse, the war on alcohol paved the way for the war on drugs; many former Prohibition agents signed up to crusade against marijuana after the ban on booze ended.
Fun Fact #5 U.S. government poisoned alcohol during the 1920s [alcohol] prohibition. They decided to poison the country’s illegal alcohol supply by adding toxins like highly toxic methanol. In total, an estimated 10,000 people died as a result.
Fun Fact #4 The U.S. government used dead babies and children for nuclear testing without their parents’ permission. In 1956, the world woke up to the horrific details of government-backed body snatching. Project Sunshine (a vile government program) was a series of research studies conducted on dead children and babies to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout on the world’s population. The studies were conducted without parental consent, and the secret study was only exposed after a woman by the name of Jean Prichard that she wasn’t able to dress her stillborn daughter’s body for her own funeral because the doctors had removed her legs and shipped them off for experimentation. Wow, Jean, thank you for your contribution to science.
Fun Fact #3
The CIA developed a heart-attack gun.
In 1975, the CIA created a secret weapon that could cause fatal heart
attacks. It worked by shooting a small
poison dart that could penetrate clothing and left nothing behind but a tiny
red dot. The dart disintegrated on
impact, and the poison dissolved quickly so it couldn’t be detected in an
autopsy.
Fun Fact #2
Contaminated polio vaccines spread a cancer-causing virus. In 1960, it was discovered that the diseased
monkey kidney cells used to make polio vaccines were contaminated with SV40, a
virus that causes cancer in humans. Nearly
100 million American children were given this vaccine between 1955 and 1963,
and scientists around the world continue to identify SV40 DNA in human lung,
bone, and brain cancers.
Fun Fact #1 A pharmaceutical company by the name of Bayer knowingly infected thousands of people from Asia and Latin America with HIV. In the 1980s, Cutter Biological, a division of the pharmaceutical company, Bayer, knowingly sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medication with a high risk of HIV contamination to hemophiliacs in Asia and Latin America even though the company was aware of the HIV risk and had created a safer, heat-treated version of the drug by 1984, they continued to sell the products abroad for over a year to avoid being stuck with stocks of a product that they couldn’t sell. In other words, they infected thousands of people so that they could save a few bucks. Scientists are smart and business savvy.
The "Jesus was a f@#*ing table-flipper, man!" remark can be heard at the end of her presentation.
