Useful medicine is pain-killer booze

Wednesday, 02 December 2009 00:00

December 2, 1878. Every trader and storekeeper in the prairie provinces (then the Northwest Territories) is affected by a court ruling that bans the sale of a popular pain killer, reports the Battleford Saskatchewan Herald.

The court ruled that the pain killer, Jamaican ginger extract, is an intoxicant, and as such its importation is prohibited by an Act of the Northwest Territories.

"Heretofore it has been treated as an ordinary article of merchandise, useful for medical purposes, and from its portability well adapted to the trade of the plains," the Herald states. "No exception has ever been taken to the sale of essence of ginger in the Saskatchewan District, and none of those who dealt in it had any idea that they were contravening the law. Now, however, its sale has been interdicted, and licenses are required to sell pain-killer and kindred preparations."

Chemists would later find that Jamaican ginger extract contains, by weight, 70 to 80 percent ethanol, an alcohol. Many of those who drank it were undoubtedly left "feeling no pain."