Poison Booze

The trouble with Prohibition is that it made liquor illegal . . . which made it impossible to regulate. Historians estimate that by the time Prohibition was rescinded in 1933, about 98% of all liquor contained poisons of some sort. Scary, huh?

Part of the problem was greed, part was amateur manufacturing. Adding embalming fluid gave bathtub gin an extra kick, so that was not uncommon. Some say this was the introduction of fruity mixed drinks, which were invented by bartenders to cover up the bad taste of the illegal hooch. Adulterated booze was known as money rum, sometimes bathtub gin. It was seldom real rum or gin, just moonshine, and it was often deadly.

Seems everyone knew someone who had died or gone blind after drinking bad booze. It probably happened far more often than anyone today appreciates–without any reliable statistics (it was illegal, after all) we can’t really know the extent of the devastation. Estimates by historians today suggest that during the first year of Prohibition, one thousand people died from adulterated liquor. By the fifth year, the annual toll had risen to four thousand. Why didn’t this cause more of a scandal? Remember, communications in that era were weak. People didn’t know much about what was going on in other states or even other parts of their own state. It’s a very sad side of the madcap “Roaring Twenties.” 

Gimme some Hooch!

Prohibition brought a profusion of ills, one of which was the proliferation of bathtub gin. It wasn’t always gin, and it wasn’t always made in a bathtub, but it was everywhere. Anyone could fashion a still with a copper boiler, some pipe, and a few gadgets from the hardware store, and people breaking the law tended not to be fussy about recipes. White lightning, rotgut, moonshine, panther sweat—it had a hundred names and as many unpredictable ingredients, like embalming fluid or creosote. Everyone knew of someone who had gone blind, been paralyzed, or died from drinking bathtub gin. Even a smuggled-in foreign bottle with a fancy French label was no guarantee as labels could be counterfeited and the booze adulterated.

Prohibition lasted the entire decade and longer, right into the Thirties. During these years, a huge vocabulary of slang grew up around liquor and illegal bars. Here are some of the words I’ve come across that were in common use—only a few are still in use today.

LIQUOR  SLANG                   

hooch

brown

brown plaid

coffin varnish

hair of the dog

horse liniment

panther sweat

rotgut

white lightening

monkey rum

tarantula juice

corn

giggle juice

jorum of skee

shine

snort

bootleg

belt

busthead

strike-me-dead

bathtub gin

moonshine

BAR SLANG

saloon

speakeasy

scatter

blind pig

gin mill

joint

juice joint

gin joint