In last week's C&EN, this fascinating article (article by Puja Changoiwala):
Starting on a Wednesday morning in June, 225 people were admitted to four hospitals in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Their symptoms included vomiting, stomachache, headache, diarrhea, and eye irritation.
To support the medical staff, the government brought in extra doctors from nearby medical schools. Yet 65 of the 225 patients did not survive. Their cause of death was the same—they had all consumed methanol-laced illicit liquor, purchased from local bootleggers.
“The victims included men and women; essentially, the poor. Most of them worked as manual or agricultural laborers, and they consumed the spurious liquor because it’s cheap,” says M. S. Prasanth, the top government official in the district of Kallakurichi, where the incident occurred. “It’s a problem controlling methanol. A detailed inquiry has been ordered by the Tamil Nadu government to probe the tragedy.”
It is remarkable to me how important the correct setting of public policy (such as tax policy) is to prevent bad outcomes like methanol poisoning.*
*Cases like this seem to indicate that societal norms such as 'don't adulterate potable items with poisons' come with sufficient societal wealth. What a grim comment on humanity.
I can't believe denatured alcohol is legal. It would be illegal for someone to put poison in food to retaliate against a lunch thief or to rig up a booby-trap to shoot a trespasser, but poisoning ethanol to deter illicit drinking is A-OK.
ReplyDeleteThis is a longstanding problem in India. I feel like you see one of these methanol stories there every few years. Lest we think that wealth alone solves the problem, remember that many people in the US will die of fentonyl poisoning thinking they are buying a different drug. When someone buys from illegal operators (alcohol bootleggers or drug dealers) they are dealing with people who have already demonstrated that they do not care about rules or social conventions and will make money by any means.
ReplyDeleteThis was also a problem in the US during prohibition. You could usually get away with it if you kept the amount of methanol low enough compared to the ethanol, and some people learned to like the taste, but if you get greedy and add to much, you start killing people or making them go blind. There was one incident (on a much smaller scale) where a bottle of pure methanol was served to people and killed something like 16 people and caused some major political consequences, but I forget the rest from my history class. (I come from a location where a lot of Canadian alcohol was smuggled across the boarder so there was a sidebar in the textbook about it)
ReplyDeletethere was a case in Czech Republic of intentional methanol poisoning to drive a competing distillery out of business - producers of cheap popular liquors (who produced partly from non-taxed illegal alcohol) bought methanol from Poland and produced a killer batch of booze - and faked the labels of their competitor who was also active in gray market with non-taxed booze. These psycho's knew that they were going to kill people and it was their business plan all along
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