As a little late-night reading tonight, we highly suggest that you check out this fantastic Slate article after you get home from the Clientele show. Written by Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, it tells the tale of how, in an effort to discourage drinking during Prohibition, the federal government required manufacturers of industrial-grade alcohols not meant for human consumption to add ill-tasting chemicals to their products so as to discourage people from turning to them as replacements for their favorite tipples. When bootleggers devised ways of re-distilling the industrial alcohol to make it potable, the government responded by requiring the manufacturers to use more harmful chemicals in an attempt to scare people away from alcohol; chemicals used included gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and methyl alcohol, the last of which proved particularly deadly. Blum estimates that this poisoning program may have killed upwards of 10,000 Americans, yet it remains largely unremembered nowadays. Now is probably as good a time as ever to familiarize ourselves.