Summary
Four people have died, including 19-year-old Australian Bianca Jones, two Danish women in their 20s, and a 56-year-old US citizen, after suspected methanol poisoning in Vang Vieng, a popular backpacker destination in Laos.
Several others, including six British and one New Zealand traveler, remain hospitalized.
The poisoning is believed to be linked to free shots offered at a local bar, prompting warnings from travelers to avoid local spirits.
Authorities fear a mass poisoning, with investigations underway into the source of the contaminated drinks.
As I understand it, you can pretty easily fuck up when distilling and leave the methanol in if you don’t know what you’re doing. The first bit of stuff that boils off and collects, the foreshots, contains awful stuff like methanol and acetone. If you don’t remove this you’ll have methanol in your moonshine (and also it will taste awful).
This probably wasn’t done maliciously, would be my guess, but rather someone was learning how to use a still and seriously messed up.
Edit: I may be wrong, it sounds like you’d have to drink a lot of tainted moonshine to die. So maybe this was malicious. Or someone accidentally served foreshots.
Yeah the issue is that methanol mixed with ethanol, which you naturally find in spirits that have been distilled carelessly (or in cost cutting) is less poisonous than pure methanol. Ethanol is actually an antidote to methanol poisoning (although not the preferred one if fomepizol is available) so when they’re mixed you’re less likely to die from it (though you still might go blind, as methanol is acutely toxic to the optic nerve).
In these cases where multiple people died I’m more likely to suspect they were served commodity methanol which is used as a fuel additive and industrial solvent. This stuff is extremely cheap and readily available.
What a tragedy. I feel terrible for these people! My former roommate knew a girl in high school who died from methanol poisoning at a party after some kids found a bottle in somebody’s garage. It’s really terrible.
On a related note, I am struggling to understand why the US still denatures alcohol to intentionally make it fatal for teens. Other countries require that denatured alcohol be dyed and to have terrible bitter flavors added so that it can’t be accidentally confused with a strong liquor. Hell, the Soviets even required this.
The U.S. has a very strong affinity for the Just-World Fallacy. It underlies almost everything you can think of in terms of their laws and beliefs. Many Americans believe in retributive justice, not rehabilitation or restorative justice. Many Americans are also strongly individualist and staunchly opposed to government regulation.
I think a lot of this can be traced back to the US’s founding as a set of colonies leading to the Declaration of Independence. This gives American culture a rugged independence, rebelliousness, and anti-government-intervention.
Few points:
Depending what’s being fermented the quantity of methanol can be quite low. Most “sugar wash” type home distillations are quite low in methanol. Certain fruits can yield higher but this isn’t the cheap “moonshine” you’d find and even then it’s unlikely to poison someone in the volume present.
The distillation process doesn’t add methanol, nor ethanol, just concentrates it by boiling it off and leaving behind the higher boiling water etc. Drinking any fermented natural alcohol still results in the consumption of some methanol. In fact if you look up your local regulations, every country has an acceptable amount of methanol they allow in commercial products. Drinking a distilled product concentrates what is already present, so binge drinking it can result in more consumption of methanol as a by product, but doesn’t magically make some shots deadly.
Most home distillers err* on the side of caution and throw away their foreshots and heads “just in case” and also often take the end of a distillation run (tails) and keep those out of their hooch as well.
It’s not exactly “easy to fuck up” to the point you poison someone with methanol, though to be fair to you this is a pretty wide spread myth.