Free The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Page A

lobbying for a larger staff. If Norris would give up “playing politics, that is endeavoring to fill positions,” the medical examiner would find that he had extra time to work on improving his department from within. But the mayor acknowledged in the same letter that he’d been telling Norris this for two years; he had no real expectation of his advice being taken.
    Norris, naturally, continued to demand that larger staff. Meanwhile he and Gettler decided to launch a campaign alerting residents of “the liquor capitol of the country” to the dangers of wood alcohol. “We have found what apparently is an increased number of cases of methyl alcohol, as shown by chemical examination of the viscera,” Norris wrote to the health department. “This would indicate that the alcohol sold all over the city contains methyl alcohol in dangerous amounts.”
    In December there had been forty-two wood alcohol deaths in Manhattan and another nine in the surrounding boroughs; more than a hundred new cases of alcohol-related blindness had also been reported. The National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness, which kept its headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pointed out that this pattern was repeating across the country. Nearly a thousand people nationwide had recently lost their eyesight due to wood alcohol poisoning. Doctors attributed the blindness to the destructive effect of formic acid on the optic nerves.
    As the month wound down, as the official Prohibition date got closer, Norris, Gettler, the city health commissioner, the head of the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Committee for Blindness Prevention held a press conference urging the city to prevent the sale and distribution of wood alcohol and all other forms of methyl alcohol. “One teaspoon of wood alcohol is enough to cause blindness,” Norris warned. And drinking a tumbler of the stuff could kill a man within a few hours.
    Gettler, Norris, and their comrades unanimously predicted that Prohibition, rather than making alcohol disappear, would instead create “numerous harmful substitutes for whiskey.” They made the prediction in December 1919, too early to say whether they would be proved right or whether they were just expressing the dark perspective that came from too many hours of working in Bellevue’s pathology building.

THREE

    CYANIDES (HCN, KCN, NaCN) 1920–1922

    C OCKTAIL PARTIES sparkled defiantly through the last chime of the day, to the dreaded first minute of January 20, 1920. With morning would come the official start of Prohibition, so the revelers danced through the night in black-draped rooms featuring open coffins to collect empty bottles. In Times Square, crowds gathered to mourn the stroke of midnight. The dancers and the mourners were shiny in party clothes, somber in mock funeral wear, dressed up with black top hats and smoke-fine veils, just as drunk as they could be. Some stayed into the morning, crowding along Broadway with their whiskey-fed protests. Others slipped away to continue the festivities in private.
    It was easy enough to keep the party going. As soon as legal drinking ended, purveyors of illicit alcohol came helpfully forward. As Gettler had predicted, they offered some devastatingly lethal brews. That January poison alcohol deaths rippled across the country: eight in New York City, four dead in a single day in Hartford, two in Toledo, seven in Washington, D.C. Soon the police discovered that murderers had learned to take advantage. In a typical case, barely a month after Prohibition, two men were found dead in Newark, several hours after buying liquor at a Bowery joint. They were thought to be alcohol deaths until a standard chemical analysis of the bodies found they were loaded with potassium cyanide. The killer, whoever he was, was long gone.
    Within a year, the once openly rowdy saloons had given way to secretive speakeasies and to bootleggers who would sneak gin to one’s door at a delivery rate of