[Granville-Hough] 2-4 Apr 2009 - Blue Language And the Jakewalk Blues

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

(GWH.  Harold Hopkins and I were schoolmates in Mize Grade School, Mize, 
MS.  As he was almost a year older than I, he was in the grade ahead of 
mine.  He became a journalist and worked for several government agencies 
in Washington, DC, in public relations.  He prepared this article for 
the Food and Drug Administration about 1980.  It seems most fitting that 
someone with personal experience with a victim of this Jakeleg malady 
got an opportunity to study it and see how it developed.)

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    	/From _FDA Consumer, _June 1980.

    	/Prohibition, that noble experiment, is a chapter in America's 
history that will forever be studied and interpreted.  For one thing, 
the era encouraged lawbreaking -- often on a widespread scale and 
sometimes with tragic results.  Here's the story of one such tragedy and 
FDA's role in stemming it./

	By Harold Hopkins
	/Harold Hopkins is editorial director of _FDA Consumer./

    Fifty years ago when I was 8 and my dad was 34 (c 1930), we did some 
horse swapping.  I taught him to walk.  He taught me to cuss.
    He had developed a strange paralysis in his lower legs and feet, and 
the doctor had told him he'd never walk again, and he said he'd be 
swizzzled if that was so, and that's how I entered the picture as his 
eldest -- and at that time only -- son.  In that summer of 1930 a part 
of the house was cleared of family clutter to make room for the business 
of walking.  Dad would get up from his chair, holding onto me for 
support.  As we started across the room he's let go, wave me away, and 
start out on his own.  in a step or two his legs would crumple under him 
and he'd sprawl headlong, full length across the floor, unable to drop 
to his knees to break the fall.  Then he'd empurple the air with 
profanity signifying his pain and frustration.  I'd help him up, and 
he'd try again across the room, hour upon hour, day after day.
    Every time he fell there came a string of oaths, with some 
imaginative variations.  I had heard him swear before at what he called 
his 'Gimp" hand when it, at times, refused to do whe he expected of it 
because it had stopped a piece of shrapnel years before I was born or 
even thought of (WW I).  Now he had a pair of gimp legs, and the 
epithets he heaped upon them were eloquent with authority.
    Although my end of the bargain was the easier one, I did get him 
walking again -- a grotesque, floundering mockery of a man headed 
somewhere.  It wasn't the finest of walks but it did get him to most of 
the places he wanted to go, though not again to the woods, fields, and 
streams that he loved to roam with gun or pole.
    In those silent distant summer days, as he sprawled helplessly on 
the floor, I learned to cuss too, and I had reason.  Not long prior to 
the onset of paralysis he had, one morning, given in to my childish 
wheedling and had taken me with him on a hunt through the woods -- my 
first.  I had to run to keep up.  We saw no game, but he showed me how 
to aim and shoot the Winchester 20 gage at a piece of  newspaper 
fastened to a tree.  It was the first time I ever fired a real gun and 
its roar told me of time to come then the piece of paper would be a 
quail, a rabbit, or something bigger.
    So in our later walking sessions in that hot southern summer of 
1930, as he lay on the floor gathering up his resolve, I swore silently 
and methodically at the impersonal, unknown forces that had deprived me 
of my hunting partner and made me -- before my two brothers came along 
-- the only able bodied male in the house.
    There was never any mystery about how he got his paralysis, but only 
as I grew older did I come to realize the events leading to it were 
neither impersonal nor unknown.  My father had become one of thousands 
of victims of a part tragedy, part cruel joke known as the Jakeleg, a 
numbness and permanent paralysis of the lower legs and feet from 
drinking a toxic substance called triorthocresyl phosphate.  That 
chemical had been illegally used to adulterate a popular 
over-the-counter drug product, fluid extract of Jamaica ginger.  The 
label on Jamaica ginger  extract, which its users often called :jake" 
recommended it use to relieve several common symptoms, and the usual 
dose was a few drops in a glass of sweetened water.  But its real 
marketability was in its us as an alcoholic beverage by people 
frustrated at the 18th amendment's nonsense proscribing the sale of 
alcoholic beverages.
    Thus, jake was a legal product used illegally.  In our State 
(Mississippi) it was sold covertly and sometimes openly, depending on 
the temperance of the times and place, in drugstores and corner 
groceries, by the bottle or by the case.  one of the flat 2-oz bottles 
fit easily into a shirtpocket.
    The Great Jakewalk of 1930 was a mass poisoning that, in number of 
lives blighted, made the sulfanilamide tragety of 1937 and the 
thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s very small potatoes.  Yet, 
despite the numbers it affected -- estimates have ranged from 35,000 to 
50,000 -- and despite the flurry of popular songs about jakewalking 
blues and jakewalking daddies and the sly jokes about little old ladies 
and pious parsons laid low by an affliction they could but refuse to 
acknowledge, this wide epidemic went relatively unnoticed in the press 
and has been largely bypassed in the annals of the Depression years.  

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Subject: Blue Language and the Jakewalk Blues - 2d part, 3 April 2009

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"I can't eat, I can't talk;
Been drinking mean Jake, Lord, now can't walk
Ain't got nothin' to lose,
For I'm a Jake walkin' papa, with the Jake walk Blues,"
from "The Jake Walk Blues," by the Allen Brothers, 1930.

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    For one thing, the largest number of victims were concentrated in 
States mostly dry by local ordinance or traditional temperance leaning.  
Here the drugstore had been doing business in jake -- produced since 
1863 -- long before Prohipition became effective.  For another, a great 
many of the jake victims were ashamed at being caught in their illicit 
pleasures and were reticent, sometimes stubbornly so, about letting 
their names be added to the growing statistics produced by jake.  To 
many people the miscreants brought down by Jakeleg were simply overtaken 
by a just retribution for flouting that most hallowed of U. S. 
Documents, the Constitution.  A proposal by a hastily formed association 
representing some of the victims, asking Congress to give them relief on 
grounds the Government had failed to protect them from an unwholesome 
proprietary medicine, died on the vine.
    Some of the victims died too, either directly of the paralysis or of 
its complications.  Some went to bed to stay.  Some settled for life in 
a wheelchair.  Some eventually progressed to crutches or walking canes.  
Some, like my father, became able to walk again unassisted, their 
flapping, uncertain gait making them the objects of ridicule.  A few 
lightly afflicted victims recovered almost completely.
    The climate that made the Jakeleg epidemic possible was almost 
predictable -- an outcome of the difficulty of enforcing Prohibition, 
abetted by bootlegger's greed.   Those enforcing the Nation Prohibition 
(Volstead) Act did not take long to discover that some people were 
escaping its effect by drinking a drug product called tincture of 
Jamaica ginger, an alcoholic mixture with just enough of the expensive 
Jamaican variety of ginger for flavoring.
     At first, the prohibition Agency required the bottlers of these 
tinctures to operate with a special permit, but as it became obvious 
that jake was being used almost exclusively as a beverage, the Agency 
restricted marketing to the almost undrinkable fluid extract of ginger.  
Agents announced that tey would seize any product that they found did 
not meet the U. S. Pharmacopoeia's specifications for fluid extract of 
ginger, which called for so much ginger solids to be dissolved in the 
alcohol that most people found the mixture too hot to drink as a 
beverage.  That satisfied the Prohibition Agency, which considered it 
officially nonpotable.  A spoonful in a glass of sweetened water was all 
most people could swallow.
    Some drank the supernot stuff anyway, spiking it or chasing it with 
a milder beverage such as soda pop, but the U.S.P. Formula requirement 
effectively knocked the bottom out of the legal jake trade.  Some of the 
Jake makers and their clients -- whose main jobs were to verify that the 
alcohol they purchased from various sources was potable and not cut with 
water and other cheaper ingredients -- were directly affiliated with 
bootleggers, from whom they got their alcohol.  They looked for ways to 
get around the Prohibition Agency requirement.  Into some jake went 
various ingredients the formulators felt would neutralize the ginger or 
substitute for it and still get past the Agency's chemical tests.  The 
key to expanding sales was to use nonginger ingredients difficult to 
identify by routine Government tests.
    These were tricks of the bootleg trade, old stuff to those who had 
long operated outside the law.  Alcohol would be bought from illegal 
sources and fluid extract of ginger from a legitimate comany, and these 
could be mixed with various adulterants to neutralize or mask the 
stronger taste.  Typical ingredients were rosin, castor oil, and balsam 
of tolu.  Although some were not necessarily harmful, they had no place, 
and thus were illegal in the U.S.P. version of flluid extract of ginger.
    Most of these ingredients were difficult to identify in jake, given 
the state of field analytical chemistry in 1930.  This minor difficulty 
did not seem of earthshaking importance.  At this time -- 8 years before 
enactment of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act -- the Food and Drug 
Administration operated under the Food and Drug Act of 1906.  Under that 
law a drug product did not have to be proved safe before marketing, of 
for that matter, effective either.  FDA applied most of its attention to 
drugs considered potentially the most dangerous.  Since jake up to that 
time seemed relatively harmless, and since the tough Prohibition Agents 
were looking at jake manufacturers very closely, that product was not 
one of FDA'a major concerns.
    Then the Jakeleg epidemic hit.
    Late in February 1930, several cases of a peculiar paralysis came to 
the attention of doctors in an Oklahoma City hospital.  Then the 
Oklahoma City Health Department reported around 60 cases of the same 
malady.  Then epidemic reports began coming from several states almost 
simultaneously. in each the signs of paralytic effects became apparent 
about 10 days after drinking jake.
    By April 23 a total of 536 cases were on record in 39 Oklahoma 
counties and, since many of the victims were ashamed and reluctant to 
report their affliction and its cause, health authorties estimated the 
actual number at 1,500 to 2,000.  Other large outbreaks occurred in 
Southern and Midwestern States: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, 
Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas.  Smaller epidemics were 
reported in Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, 
New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Indiana.
    From the beginning, there was never any question that the paralysis 
came from drinking jake.  And almost as quickly the batches of poisoned 
jake were traced by FDA or Prohibition Agents through dealers and 
distributors to one firm in Boston, Hub Products Co., which also 
operated under several other names, including Fulton Specialty Co.

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Subject: Blue Language And the Jakewalk Blues, 3rd part - 4 April 2009.

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GWH:    In considering the way the judges and lawyers in Boston handled this 
case, one must conclude that the judge was a victim of astounding 
ignorance, and/or mistrust of government agencies from Washington, DC, 
or  susceptible to bribery or other coercion.  There is little doubt 
that, today, US firms trading in arms, chemical stocks, and  raw drugs  
are so influential that they make a mockery of any effort  to suppress 
illegal drug trafficking.  The question before us is this: Would 
legalizing drugs improve the situation?  If we say YES, then how would 
we go about it?

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     FDA's chief of drug control, J. J. Durrett, made an investigative 
swing through the South where some of the lagrest outbreaks of Jakeleg 
had occurred.  Upon returning, Durrett wrote to the chief of FDA's 
Eastern District about watching an experiment in New Orleans in wicch a 
pig was paralyzed when given some of the poisoned jake.  And he 
addedddd: "We cannot escape the impression that somewhere around the Hub 
Products Co. and its products the answer (to the cause of the poisoning) 
is to be found."
    It was.  While Durrett was urging the prompt collection of samples 
of the poisoned jake to build a case against Hub, the chief of FDA's New 
York Station, Joseph Callaway Jr., reported to Washington that his 
laboratories had extracted from a jake sample "an oily residue 
resembling phenol."  Before 1930 was out that "oily residue" had been 
identified by other Government chemists as the poisonous substance 
triorthocresyl phosphate.
    By mid-summer Federal grand juries in several cities had returned 
indictments against Hub's principals -- Harry Gross, President, and Max 
Reisman, his brother-in-law and part owner.  When FDA investigators went 
to the Hub plant at 65 Fulton Street, Boston, Gross refused permission 
for them to inspect it and told them to return the next day.  They did, 
but samples given them contained no unusual substances.  Hub Products 
closed down its operations immediately.  Investigators of the 
Prohibition Agency and FDA made seizures in a number of cities, but too 
often in tracing shipments from Hub to distributors they found that the 
evidence had already been drunk.  Enough of the poisoned product were 
intercepted in various cities, however, to weave together a strong web 
of evidence implicating Hub Products.
    In February 1931, the several cases pending against Gross and 
Reisman were consolidated for trial in Boston, and the two men were 
charged with conspiracy to violate, and with violations of the National 
Prohibition Act's prohibition against selling jake as an alcoholic 
beverage and of the adulteration and misbranding provisions of the Food 
and Drugs Act of 1906.  Both men pleaded guilty.  The two men were 
sentenced to 2 years imprisonment and fined $1,000 each.  However, the 
jail sentence was suspended and both were placed on probation for 2 
years.  FDA men, who had worked so hard to bring the cases to court, 
were stunned.  The light sentences were later said to have been given in 
a plea bargaining arrangement under which the defendants were to present 
evidence that would convict the "real" culprits, the New York 
bootleggers from whom Gross claimed he got all his products..
    As a result of this arrangement, Gross and Reisman and their lawyers 
met and conferred in Mid-May of 1931 with Haven Parker, assistant U. S. 
Attorney in Boston, but the information they offered was nebulous and 
insubstantial.  The New York culprits had evaporated.
    FDA was particularly miffed becaused it representatives were not 
asked to this conference.  On May 31, 1931, George H. Adams, chief of 
FDA's Boston Station reported evidence to headquarters that traced the 
sale of 135 ballons of triothoocresyl phosphate to Hub Products Co.  
Under the trade name Lyndol -- a plasticizer manufactured by the 
Celluloid Co., Newark, N. J. and used as an ingredient in lacquers and 
othe chemical products -- this chemical had been sold to Hub by a 
chemical products broker, Raffi and Swanson, Boston.  This was enough 
triorthocresy phosphate to adulterate 200 barrels of jake or 640,000 
2-oz. bottles.
    The failure of the conference with Gross and Reisman to provide 
solid evidence against the New York bootleggers they claimed were 
responsible for the poisoned jake strengthened the FDA's determination 
to find the source of the contamination.  Trials had been held in New 
York and elsewhere and a number of people convicted of selling the 
poisoned product, but evidence of who performed the original 
adulteration was not established.
    After conducting its own investigation in New York, FDA concluded 
that both Gross and Reisman were lying about the origins of the 
poisoning and thus had violated the terms of their probation.  The 
Agency decided to probe further in Boston.
    George White, a former employee at Hub, told investigators that he 
had received the barrels of Lydol, left them on the third floor of the 
Hub premises, where they were removed to the fourth floor by Gross and 
the empty containers returned afterward.  White said he had no access to 
the fourth floor, which was kept locked at all times, and that Hub's 
goods apparently were shipped out at night because he would see them 
near the elevator n the third floor when he left for the day and they 
would be gone when he returned in the morning.  Adams presented this 
information to the U.S. Attorney.
    On April 1 1932, Gross was charged with violating probation and 
ordered to serve his 2-year prison term.  Later Judge James A. Lowell 
refused to hear the Government's case asking revocation of Reisman's 
probation.
    Other charges of selling poisoned jake had been brought against 
Gross and Hub Products in December 1931 and had been tried January 25 
1932.  The defendants pleaded guilty and the only sentence was a fine of 
$1, Judge Lowell explaining that these cases should be considered a part 
of the earlier ones, for which the defendants had already been punished.
    The jake poisoning events of 1930 showed plainly that legislation 
was needed to require premarket testing to assure the safety of drugs 
sold in the United States.  The strongest charges that could be brought 
against the men responsible for so many deaths and permanent cripplings 
were that they conspired to ship and had shipped large quantities of 
adulterated and misbranded drugs "consisting of approximately 1,000 
gallons of a product called 'fluid extract of ginger,' and sometimes 
called 'Liquid Medicine in Bulk,' which differed from the standard of 
strength, quality, and purity as determined by the tests laid down by 
the United States Pharmacopoeia for fluid extract of ginger."
    Some observers of the widespread Jakeleg epidemic of 1930 considered 
it more joke than jake, and in a way it was, a grim and lasting 
remindeer of the country's noble, adventurous, and sometimes hilarious 
dozen years with legally imposed temperance.  When the Nation was voting 
to go dry in 1918, my father was in France and had no say in the 
matter.  But the notion didn't set well with him and he had no intention 
whatever of letting the agents respoonsible for enforcing Prohibition 
deter him from taking a drink, if he could find one.  Just 3 years shy 
of Repeal, when happy days were just ahead, he and 35,000 other revelers 
found one drink too many.