Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont in their authoritative book Eating in America report that 11,700 people died in 1927 alone from imbibing drink poisoned by the government. Other sources put the number much lower. However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until
