My grandpa drank a shot of schnapps every night and called it his medicine. I thought it was a euphemism but apparently he was actually taking an antidote prophylactically. You can't be too careful. He never once got methanol poisoning.
From https://actamedicamarisiensis.ro/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/...
> Only 18% of the tested 56 samples met UE regulation regarding methanol content of alcoholic beverages (0.4% in alcoholic drinks containing 40% ethanol). The highest concentration of 2.39% was found in a plum brandy. Plum brandies contained significantly higher amounts of methanol than brandies made from other fruits (0.91 vs 0.52%, p = 0.01)
Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it, but then they hurt a bunch of people and never faced any consequences...
We still do this now. We don't do it because alcohol is illegal, we do it because we levy higher taxes on non-poisonous alcohol, and if someone decides to drink the poisoned alcohol, they deserve what they get.
Several beverage factories proposed to rework themselves to produce sanitizer instead, which would have been good for everyone.
But they couldn't, because federal law would have required them to poison the sanitizer, which would have contaminated their machinery so badly that they would have been unable to switch back to producing drinkable alcohol afterwards.
So - even if we ignore the idea that intentionally poisoning people is wrong - there was a serious cost to the legal regime, one that still exists.
Are there any benefits?
This is false. Several breweries and distilleries started producing sanitizer basically overnight [0]. The requirement to add denaturing components to alcohol was suspended during the pandemic specifically to allow it [1].
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distilleries-aroun...
[1] https://www.ttb.gov/laws-regulations-and-public-guidance/pub...
I looked this up, it is directionally correct but if you are in a hospital setting they have better options https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482121/
Would using pectinase to break it down first reduce the risk?
Seems like these sorts of "yes it could be unsafe in theory but the reality of physics and incentives make this mostly irrelevant" type things get missed far too often certain parts of the internet to be coincidence.
That said, the fact that it dropped on a weekend did it no favors the first time around.