Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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A L C O RUB
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The drink of last resort for desperate alcoholics is alcorub, which is isopropyl or rubbing
alcohol. In 1989 Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and
presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was rushed unconscious to the hospital in Boston
after sucking down some rubbing alcohol while battling alcoholism and depression. If she
had been hanging out with certain blues singers during Prohibition, she might have
learned to sniff alcorub, or she could have resorted to the marginally less lethal
canned heat.
Fuel. During Prohibition, impoverished alcoholics also distilled alcohol from shoe polish
by straining it through bread, drank Jake (a patent medicine), and sniffed alcorub to stave
off the DTs.
Prohibition began creeping across the United States in 1913. By 1916 the manufacture,
transportation, import, export, sale, and purchase of alcohol was illegal in 26 of the 48
states. On January 16, 1920, alcohol was outlawed across the nation by the 18 th
Amendment, which was ratified on January 16, 1919 and mandated that:
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation
of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof
from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage
purposes is hereby prohibited.
Prohibition quickly created a profitable black market as huge quantities of booze were
smuggled in from Canada and various Caribbean islands. This smuggling operation
provided work and training to a new generation of ambitious young men, as one recalled:
ly [in West Palm Beach]. He had two
speedboats to go to the Bahamas and bring in bootleg whiskey. Those days the whole
country was dry. I would go over to the Bahamas with a black man, Jack, that he had
working for him. We would load the boat with fifty or sixty cases of whisky and start
back at night. The man would bring the boat into the spot we had picked out by following
the stars in the sky. We made at least three trips for Al Capone. He would have his cars at
the spot where we would come in at and load the cars. Then they would go off
to Chicago. 19
were spotted] so we threw all the whiskey overboard. Without the whiskey there was no
evidence. The Coast Guard did come up to us and told us to stop. We did. They searched
the boat and did not find anything. They asked us where we were coming from.
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