The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

Author:Deborah Blum [Blum, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, mobi
Tags: History, United States, Medical, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Forensic Medicine, Toxicology
ISBN: 9780143118824
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

THE NEW YORK PAPERS—those wet publications so despised by the Anti-Saloon League—promptly embraced Norris’s report as evidence of a government policy gone haywire. “Prohibition in this area is a complete failure,” the Herald Tribune’s editorial page declared, “enforcement a travesty, the public a victim of poisonous liquor.” Columnist Heywood Broun wrote in the New York World, “The Eighteenth is the only amendment which carries the death penalty.” And the Evening World described the federal government as a mass poisoner, noting that no administration had been more successful in “undermining the health of its own people.”

The impact of Norris’s report rippled outward beyond his city. U.S. Senator James Reed of Missouri told the St. Louis Post that the New York medical examiner had convinced him that Prohibition supporters were uncivilized: “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes.” The St. Paul Pioneer Press called the government “an accessory to murder when it uses deadly denaturants.” Even the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had supported the Eighteenth Amendment, said that sympathy for the cause did not mean “we wish to inflict punishment upon those who persist in violating Prohibition laws.”

And the Chicago Tribune put it like this:Normally, no American government would engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch a counterfeiter. It would not put “Rough on Rats” on a cheese sandwich even to catch a mail robber. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the mails. It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.

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