Rather puts me in mind of the deliberate poisoning of alcohol by the government during Prohibition. The attitude was that if someone died from drinking poisoned hooch, well it was their fault for drinking it. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/government-poison-10000-am...
The government did not poison supplies of alcohol meant for human consumption, nor did it intentionally aim to kill those who drank the tainted products.
That's a big difference from a deliberate poisoning.
And that still happens today - you can buy "denatured alcohol" that is unfit for human consumption.
Quoting the referenced article, in turn quoting a Slate article:
> To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to “renature” the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
They didn't put poison specifically in alcohol for human consumption, but they did put poison into chemicals that they knew would be consumed by humans. At the end of the day, I don't see the difference.
I didn't say that it doesn't still happen today. All I'm saying, is that it doesn't make much difference if the government directly poisons alcohol, or, if it poisons chemicals that it knows people are going to drink. At the end of the day, the people that die as a result don't care about the distinction.
What is the difference between directly killing someone and taking an action that you know will result in someone's death? The end result is exactly the same.
