alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases still remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions, antiseptics, embalming fluid, and much more. Thus, it was necessary to allow its continued production for legitimate purposes. Inevitably, some of that still-legal alcohol (actually a great deal: sixty million gallons a year, by one estimate) was diverted into the bootleg trade. To render industrial alcohol disagreeable for drinking, the government took to denaturing it—that is, dosing it with poisons such as strychnine and mercury,
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