Alma 40:26 includes the phrase: “and they drink the dregs of a bitter cup.” The word dregs appears in the Bible—once in Psalms and twice in Isaiah. The Isaiah instances are also quoted in 2 Nephi. However, in the handwritten Printer’s Manuscript (PM) of the Book of Mormon, the word used is drugs, not dregs. John Gilbert, the 1830 typesetter, likely assumed this was an error by Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery and unilaterally replaced drugs with dregs.

Royal Skousen concurs that this was likely an innocent correction by Gilbert.

Yet this theory requires us to believe that Oliver Cowdery misheard Joseph’s dictation and recorded drugs in both the Original Manuscript (OM) and later in the PM—despite dregs being the clearly more appropriate term, given the Old Testament precedent. While drugs reads awkwardly in the Alma passage, the broader question remains: are we to accept that the typesetter, not the prophet or his scribe, was the one to “correct” the record?