Prohibition was the nationwide ban on making, selling, and transporting alcohol in the United States, in force from 1920 to 1933 under the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. It was the crowning victory of a century-long movement to rid the country of drink. Widely evaded and linked to a boom in organized crime, it became the only constitutional amendment ever repealed.
To make people stop drinking, the United States government turned to poison. Industrial alcohol was legal, and bootleggers stole it and re-cleaned it to sell, so federal officials ordered it laced with lethal toxins as a deterrent. The bootleggers' chemists could not always strip the poison back out. By one common estimate, tainted liquor killed something like ten thousand people before the ban ended. A law meant to protect Americans from the harm of alcohol was, in its final years, deliberately killing them with it.