…alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions and antiseptics, embalming fluids and much more….To render industrial alcohol disagreeable for drinking, the government took to ‘denaturing’ it by dosing it with poisons such as strychnine and mercury which had the power to blind, cripple or kill those who drank it.”

Bill Bryson, writing about one unpleasant aspect of Prohibition
One Summer – America 1927
Published 2013