Professor Yandell Henderson testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that beers containing 3-4% alcohol by volume were not intoxicating. Photograph, 1932.

"The industrial toxicologist Yandell Henderson argued that alcohol should be considered analogous to carbon monoxide - clearly a poison, yet a normal part of civilized life and only problematic above a determinable and manageable exposure threshold. This argument had political force in the early 1930s as part of the contention that beer was not an "intoxicating liquor." It was more broadly persuasive because it was consistent with Americans' experience with industrial poisons, for which exposure levels had been set forth by toxicologists such as Henderson" -- Pauly, op. cit.