Boy did PBS bury the lede after a bunch of paragraphs-
Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in India, where the poor cannot afford licensed brands from government-run shops.
These people died because they were desperately poor and sought the only escape they could afford.
Did some more digging to get us some more helpful info here. I assembled quotes from 3 articles to make you guys a more cohesive story. Take that AI, I’m coming for your jobs! 😆
First quote is from OP’s PBS article. The rest is assembled from this BBC article, and this other article that the BBC referred to for their info.
Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in India, where the poor cannot afford licensed brands from government-run shops. The illicit liquor, which is often spiked with chemicals such as pesticides to increase potency, has also become a hugely profitable industry as bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product to the poor at a cheap rate.
The district police had arrested one person on Wednesday, June 19, identified as Kannukutty (49). He is accused of peddling the liquor. The police had also seized 200 litres of liquor from his possession. According to the police, Kannukutty had mixed methanol in the country liquor and had sold it in packets.
Family members of the deceased, however, told TNM that the police are complicit. “Illicit liquor is regularly sold in this area. The police know. If someone complains, they will stop for 10 days but resume again. If a person complains, the police will tip the peddler off on who raised the complaint and immediately, that person is threatened by the peddlers. That’s why people have refrained from complaining. The peddlers definitely pay a sum of money to the police to continue selling illicit liquor,” a family member of a victim said.
Another family member of the victim added that Karunapuram’s Dalit Colony has seen the most number of deaths. “The sale of illicit liquor is so rampant here that even 13 and 15-year-old boys are being sold packets by peddlers. These peddlers are now also selling Marijuana. Today, despite so many deaths, no one apart from the Tahsildar and a few police have come to this Dalit Colony. We want the officials to initiate strict action and put an end to the sale of drugs and illicit liquor,” she added.
A day earlier, Chief Minister MK Stalin expressed his shock over the tragic incident and announced actions against officials who failed to prevent it. In a post on X, MK Stalin said, “I was shocked and saddened to hear the news of the deaths of people who had consumed adulterated liquor in Kallakurichi. Those involved in the crime have been arrested in this matter. Action has also been taken against the officials who failed to prevent it.
Authorities have also suspended a senior police official and ten members of the state’s prohibition enforcement wing - which overseas the smuggling of illicit alcohol in the state - for negligence.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has announced a compensation of 1m rupees ($12,000; £9,425) to families of those who have died and 50,000 rupees each to those who are hospitalised.
It may be noted that earlier, in May 2023 as well, 22 persons lost their lives after consuming illicit liquor in Villupuram and Chengalpattu districts of Tamil Nadu. The Villupuram police had confirmed that the fatalities were due to the presence of methanol in the spurious alcohol consumed.
“The deaths caused by illicit liquor in the past two years under the DMK [Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam] regime have decelerated Tamil Nadu by four decades, taking us back to the 1980s,” said K Annamalai, the state chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
He demanded that the minister in charge of overseeing the sale of alcohol should resign immediately.
Fucking idiots. It’s very difficult to make enough methanol to be dangerous with a standard mash and distilling methods. Most of the time these fucking idiots are using stolen methanol from industrial sites to bump up their ABV and they make people super sick with it. Stop killing/hospitalizing your customers and you won’t get caught.
Dude ikr. You have to actively try to make methanol when you’re distilling, like only collecting the foreshots over and over.
And by that point I’d be super easy to tell it’s not regular alcohol because it will smell like nail polish remover and other volatile compounds.
What kind of smells am I looking for?
Jack smells like gasoline to me, so I’m not sure.
There’s actually more methanol in the tails than the foreshots due to complicated chemistry.
Can you elaborate or link to further reading?
I assumed methanol is the first to go because of its lower boiling point — 65 degrees compared to ethanol at 78
this explains it a bit. The quick and dirty answer is that when you boil a mash, you are boiling a solution, not just 3 individual liquids (ignoring all the other stuff in there). It’s similar to how adding salt to water lowers the freezing point and raises the boiling point.
Water is polar, while ethanol only has mild polarity. Methanol is more polar than ethanol, so it holds onto the water more. If you had a mixture of methanol and ethanol with no water, you’d probably get more methanol first, but the water changes things.
Stop using southern Indians as your drinking vessel and that wouldn’t be a problem. Daft auto written headlines…
It looks like it’s corrected now. Copy editing is sadly dead.
They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.
Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.
