Word: poison
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...think there's an argument to be made for making moonshine legal? It quickly drifts into something that should be controlled in some way. The stuff that I did get from a nip joint in southern Virginia was poison. Clearly. I had a friend get it for me. He had to go to a place he didn't want to go to, and he said he was disappointed because the guy he bought it from sometimes cuts it with bleach. Back in my hotel room, I faced down this thing in a Sierra Mist bottle that was the most wretched...
Deborah Blum knows so much about poison that even her husband sometimes shies away from her. In her new book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer profiles the two men, New York City chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler, who pioneered forensic medicine in the U.S. between 1915 and 1936. Blum talks to TIME about how the U.S. government took to poisoning its own citizens during Prohibition and why poisoners are the most frightening murderers...
...every advancement they made in forensic medicine, some other poison would pop up - it seemed like a never-ending battle. You keep pushing the rock up the hill, right? They were pretty meticulous at hunting down new poisons. And is it a never-ending game? Absolutely. We're always inventing new, creative industrial chemicals. You see the thing same today that you saw then, which is when we get 'gee whizzy' about things and put them out there in our every day lives without having enough proper respect or understanding of them...
...these bootleggers who were stealing industrial alcohol (which is regular grade alcohol that you add chemicals to in order to make it undrinkable) and distilling out the bad chemicals. The government passed new regulations that forced manufacturers of industrial alcohol to, in some cases, put 10 times as much poison in that alcohol. People started dying in droves. Scientists and toxicologists were absolutely furious saying, 'You've got to stop this.' The answer of the people who were in government and behind the dry crusade was 'Too bad for them, they're breaking the law.' In the end, they held...
...mention in your author's note that your interest in poison has been seen as a little scary. Something about your husband moving his cup of coffee away from you? He did. I'm at breakfast talking about a poison and he's edging his cup away from me. When I was working on the book proposal I had all these books about poison stacked around me, and he goes, "You know, if I die of poison, everyone is going to know you did it." Well, thanks a lot, right? (Laughs.) Even now when I go to the office people...