Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/29/toxic-booze-in-iran-sold-as-co.html
“When they keep drinking this, there’s going to be more people poisoned.”
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Criminals! Malditos!
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Shhhhhh. Don’t give Jim Bakker or that Infowars asshole any bad ideas.
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When prohibition meets alternative medicine. What a tragedy.
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Speaking of “alternative medicine”, there’s a lot of harmful and sometimes impressively stupid disinformation being spread around. A friend called me and told a conspiracy theory that there’s a coronovirus cure (she probably heard about it from charlatans on Youtube). The purported “cure” turned out to be vitamin C enemas. I tried to convince her that not only it won’t work, but also may do a lot of harm, but I don’t think she believes me.
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Bloody tragic.
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Tax purposes & phony cures – poisoned booze has a weird modern history.
According to Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin Press, [2010]), the practice was called “denaturing”. It consisted of adding noxious chemicals to alcohol sold for industrial purposes to make it unfit for human consumption. The process, long used in Europe, was introduced in the United States in 1906 as a means of exempting producers of alcohol used in paints, solvents, and the like from having to pay the taxes levied on potable spirits.
Mainly, this was done by adding some methyl alcohol (“wood alcohol”) to grain alcohol, rendering it poisonous. Some formulas also contained substances that made the product taste too awful to drink.
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“Drink this and I promise you won’t die of coronavirus.”
I guess technically speaking that was true for 300 people.
Hope these charlatans spend the rest of their lives in prison.
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Technically it is true.
It does kill the virus once the blood is enriched with around 60% methanol.
The virus also dies off after about seven days of death.
Whichever comes first.
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Iran may well have been doomed to suffer this degree of devastation on its own…
But 40 years of US sanctions can not have helped any.
It’s anybody’s guess how significant US involvement really was in the (ongoing) death tally in Iran, but as a USian taxpayer, I consider some of that blood to be on my hands, and every other USian citizen that couldn’t stop it.
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They’re probably already working to sell rebranded fish tank cleaner.
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The initial ‘cured by whisky’ was in the Daily Mail I think?
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The US governement actually tried poisoning bootleg liquor during Prohibition with the idea, I suppose, that a few deaths would temper (as is were) the public’s craving for alcohol. Oddly enough, it did no such thing and quite a few people died, thanks to their own government.
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It works; though only if they use entire Oranges.
Was the story sponsored by National Distillers?
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Well, the 300 didn’t die of the virus so I guess that counts as a win. Sorta…
Me I’ve got a bottle of very old Islay cask-strength malt that I’ll hold onto as a last-ditch treatment for after the wine and common booze is gone.
As always.
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I’ve always blamed paraquat for being how and why the strength of pot was so rapidly ramped up. Stronger pot means you need to smoke less, which means the price goes up and it becomes less bulky to transport.
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