A mysterious epidemic of paralysis was sweeping through 1920s America that had the medical community baffled. The cause was first identified not by physicians, but by blues singers.
During the prohibition, alcohol was banned but people got buzzed the best way they could. One way was through a highly alcoholic liquid called Jamaica Ginger or ‘Jake’ that got round the ban by being sold as a medicine.
Eventually the feds caught on and even such poorly disguised medicines were blacklisted but Jamaica Ginger stayed popular, and alcoholic, due to the producers including an organophosphate additive called tricresyl phosphate that helped fool the government’s tests.
What they didn’t know was that tricresyl phosphate is a slow-acting neurotoxin that affected the neurons that control movement.
The toxin starts by causing lower leg muscular pain and tingling, followed by muscle weakness in the arms and legs. The effect on the legs caused a distinctive form of muscle paralysis that required affected people to lift the leg high during walking to allow the foot to clear the ground.
This epidemic of paralysis first made the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine in June 1930, but the cause remained a mystery.
What the puzzled doctors didn’t know was that the cause had been identified by two blues musicians earlier that year, in songs released on 78rpm records.
Ishman Bracey’s song Jake Liquor Blues and Tommy Johnson’s track Alcohol and Jake Blues had hit on the key epidemiological factor, the consumption of Jamaica Ginger, likely due to their being part of the poor southern communities where jake was most commonly drunk.
Slowly, the medical community caught on, noting that the additive damaged the spinal cord and peripheral nerves, and the adulterated jake was slowly tracked down and outlawed.
The story, however, has an interesting neurological twist. In 1978, two neurologists decided to track down some of the survivors of jake poisoning 47 years after the booze fuelled epidemic hit.
They found that the original neurological explanation for the ‘jake walk’ effect was wrong. The paralysis was actually due to damage to the movement control neurons in the brain (upper motor neurons) and not the peripheral nervous system.
Jake was much more dangerous than thought and the false lead was probably due to inadequate assessments when the epidemic hit, possibly because the stigma associated with the condition prevented a thorough investigation.
The study has a poignant description of the social effect of the condition:
The shame experienced by those with jake leg possibly led some with a minimal functional disorder to deny that they ever had the disease, and patient 4 stated that he knew some such people. We heard of other men with obvious impairment who claimed to have had a stroke.
If you want to read more on this curious piece of neurological there’s a great article on Providentia you can check out for free and a renowned 2003 article from The New Yorker which is locked behind a paywall due to digital prohibition.
Link to Providentia post on Ginger Jake.
Mind Hacks 
This story makes me think about current trends in drug prohibition. If the substance of choice is banned, people will find substitutes, even if those substitutes are more dangerous than the original. As legislators close loopholes on cannabis substitutes, would-be stoners just move from potpourri that tastes like glass to bath salts that cause suicidal ideation. After witnessing the horror of alternative, a little bit of alcohol or mary jane just doesn’t look so bad.
Ha! So are you willing to say out loud, which newspaper you think is the Ginger Jake of news sources? 😉
I still find it hard to believe that people would consume a drink like that. Although some drugs have a more insidious effect – I still wonder how my days of taking Restoril and working the next day with a leaky isoflurane machine affected my liver.
This was in “Water for elephants”. I didn’t know that it was real.
I have to echo Michael, above….Just recently, (Nov.2015), a 17-yr old girl here in New Hampshire died after her father, (step-father? – same thing….), gave her what he *thought* was only heroin…. Turns out it was Fentanyl, and turns out, she DIED. Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate that’s many times stronger than heroin. It’s bad enough that fools are still killing themselves with illegal heroin, but now they’re using “legal” Fentanyl…..
Pharma continues to do more harm than good….When will *YOU**PEOPLE* *EVER* *LEARN*….????….
(c)2015, Tom Clancy, Jr., *NON-fiction
I understand the thoughts that are out there. I use to work as a paramedic and fentanyl is a very good but dangerous drug if used in access. I preferred it over morphine because the side effects were not as severe (at least not in my opinion and the way I was taught). A hospital once overdosed my Mother on Fentanyl and she went into respiratory arrest. She was saved but the message is still that too much is scary.
As for Jamaican Ginger, my Great-Grandfather was not a drinker but tried it one night consoling a friend. They were both paralyzed by the next day. He learned to walk again by standing behind a plow but he was forever crippled. Eventually, with a lot of work, he was able to exist with a cane.
In 1920’s Oklahoma City one of my uncles and several of his teenage friends would go to the drug store and the pharmacist would sell them Jake. He had a sofa in a back room where he would let them loiter for a while. Thank goodness that particular pharmacist didn’t cripple them kids. Although, my uncle went in the navy in the latter 1920’s his friends didn’t, and as time went along his mother sent him some clippings from one of the papers telling that ALL of his buddies either died or ended up crippled. BAD JUJU
there was an untouchables episode about this, season 4 episode 104 called jake dance