I am less and less able to rationalize some legislator / law enforcement / regulator / bureaucrat actions as misguided but well-intentioned or somehow not motivated by evil.
The following is a blog posting by Megan McArdle with references to another article. I'll excerpt the former in its entirety and the latter in part (though I suggest reading it in full).
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/the_majesty_of_the_law.phpThe Majesty of the Law19 Feb 2010 04:12 pm
I've read a lot about prohibition, but I never read about
the government's deliberate effort to make industrial alcohol undrinkably poisonous. Thousands of people seem to have died as a result. I wish I could say I found it surprising, but it seem to me to be of a piece with too many other brutalities in American law. We pass a law with the best of intentions, and find it doesn't work, and so we pass new regulations and policies designed to crack down on non-compliance, until we are brutalizing the population all out of proportion to the original good we were pursuing. Consider the way we have cracked down on pain medications, impeding the effectiveness of pain control for people in chronic agony out of the fear that somewhere, someone might be getting high. Or the terrifying authority we've handed the IRS, because if anyone gets away with cheating on their taxes, the terrorists will have won, or something.
http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/The Chemist's WarThe little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
By Deborah Blum
...
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
...
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....
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
Did y'all catch that? A deliberate gov't policy resulted in 10,000 deaths. I wonder why is it so difficult to believe that gov't intervention in, say, the economy can bring down a sector of the economy when gov't has been willing to make policy that they know will end in the death of citizens?
Today, we see similar thinking by gov't officials with regard to prescription painkillers. Most opiates are spiked with tylenol, so that if they are abused the abuser is poisoned and their liver is destroyed. How many people die each year form abusing opiates spiked with tylenol?
Then there is the case of morphine vs heroin as a painkiller. Both are effective, though heroin is more effective vs pain and has fewer deleterious side effects, like stopping peristalsis in the intestines (IOW, morphine will stop ones digestive system from moving food/etc. on down the line). My dad recently had lung cancer surgery. The surgery itself went fairly well, but has spent the last two months in & out of the hospital, partly with complications due to the cessation of peristalsis caused by morphine. He has lost 30+ lbs he could ill afford not due to chemotherapy, radiation & such (because he has not received such treatment), but because our regulators think heroin too addictive.
