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From Slate:
 It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and
lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency
room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with
fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him,
wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how
sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the
man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell
on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made
desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two
days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the
season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of
life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins
often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently
came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was
bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly
realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
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Re: The Chemist's War
