POISONOUS LIQUORS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18629, 9 February 1924, Page 2 (Supplement)

POISONOUS LIQUORS.

AMERICANS VICTIMISED. CHEMIST'S REVELATIONS. : ; ,: Americans who had been gaily buying Christmas supplies, of liquor purporting to have been smuggled through the Prohibition Blockade across , the Canadian border and from vessels anchored in Rum Row, 12 miles off New York, received an unpleasant shock when the chief Government chemist, Mr. J. W,Quillen, publised an analysis of 180,000 samples confiscated by the authorities. He states "that only 180 of the samples ware free of poisonous adulterants. All the rest of those taken from motor-boats and lorries contained either acetone, sulphuric acid, pyridine, ether, or other ingredients dangerous to life and health. The rum runners, declared Mr. Qui 1"en. were obviously manufacturing their iiquor aboard their vessels. He tested • the contents of a number of Scotch whisky bottles immaculately labled and* sealed which coastguards seized on board a fast motor-boat. He found them to consist of coloured alcohol. The liquor smugglers, according to him. were assembling their concoctions of redistilled and denatured alcohol at places near the border. These they pretended to have smuggled across the frontier. !■-•:-. Druggists were selling denatured alcohol at from 3s- to 4s. a gallon. The smugglers were redistilling this, manufacturing it into alleged whisky, and selling it at £8 a gallon. . ' . They were.also disposing at high prices of immense qualities of ," green " beer containing acetic aldehyde, and of -highpowered beer mixed with rotten gin. .. But the worst-deceived victim of the smugglers, according to, Mr. Quillen, was the buyer of champagne. He bought it in bottles bearing the genuine French lables for £4 a quart. Mr. Quillen' analysis showed that what these bottles really contained was a mixture of highly charged carbonated water and weak, home-manufac-tured white wine, which cost the makers 2a. a quart.