6 ms·

What if it was an accidental poisoning? Maybe the embassy got a shipment of bad rum. Methanol poisoning would explain the white matter damage and disorientation

• toomanybeersies 9y ago
  It's borderline impossible to accidentally get methanol poisoning from distilled spirits. The vast majority of cases you hear about on the news are due to spirits being cut with industrial methanol, or people accidentally drinking industrial methanol in the belief that it's ethanol. Poorly distilled spirits are going to taste bad, but they aren't going to kill you (except for ethanol poisoning). Also, if it was methanol poisoning (deliberate or not), they'd have severe vision impairment, which we haven't heard anything about.
  • razakel 9y ago
    >The vast majority of cases you hear about on the news are due to spirits being cut with industrial methanol So methanol poisoning is more likely to be the result of fraudsters selling fake branded bottles of spirits, rather than moonshine?
    • toomanybeersies 9y ago
      That's usually the case, yes.
    • NKZZ 9y ago
      Not just more likely, it's a matter of certainty. Ethanol is one of the possible treatments to methanol poisoning. Drinking badly made moonshine that has some methanol is like drinking both the poison and the cure (because ethanol will compete for treatment within the liver against methanol). It's really impossible to get poisoned by methanol by accident. If you drink enough methanol to suffer from it it's because people added a large amount of it to your drink. Whatever methanol is found in badly made moonshine just isn't enough to show any effect, not when you consider the fact that the ethanol of the moonshine will pretty much stop your body from absorbing methanol.