In a village outside Calcutta — pardon, Kolkata — methanol-laced bootleg liquor has just killed 143 people:
Many of the victims — day laborers, street hawkers, rickshaw drivers — had gathered along a road near a railway station after work to drink the illicit booze they bought for 10 rupees (20 cents) a half liter, less than a third the price of legal alcohol, district magistrate Naraya Swarup Nigam said.
They later began vomiting, suffering piercing headaches and frothing at the mouth, he said.
Angry villagers later ransacked booze shops around the village of Sangrampur, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta.
Police arrested 10 people in connection with making and distributing the methanol-tainted booze and demolished 10 illicit liquor dens in the area, said Luxmi Narayan Meena, district superintendent of police.
[...]
Despite religious and cultural taboos against drinking among Indians, 5 percent — roughly 60 million people — are alcoholics. Two-thirds of the alcohol consumed in the country is illegal homemade hooch or undocumented liquor smuggled in, according to The Lancet medical journal.The state of Gujarat, where all liquor is banned, just approved a death penalty for making, transporting or selling spurious liquor that kills people. The strict measures were proposed after 157 people died from drinking a bad batch of liquor in the city of Ahmedabad in 2009. At least 180 people died in 2008 around the southern Indian city of Bangalore from a toxic batch of homemade liquor.
The mass casualties came just days after a hospital fire in Kolkata killed more than 90 people and led to the arrest of the facility’s directors for culpable homicide.
Illicit liquor is a hugely profitable industry across India, where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product, said Johnson Edayaranmula, executive director of the Indian Alcohol Policy Alliance, an organization that fights alcohol-related problems.
The bootleggers, working in homes, hidden warehouses and even in forests, can turn 1 liter of genuine alcohol into 1,000 liters of bootlegged swill with chemicals and additives that usually cause no harm, but on occasion can lead to tragedy, he said.
Every week, one or two people across the country die from tainted liquor, he said. In 2009, at least 112 people died from a toxic brew in western India.
I question that 1,000-to-1 ratio. I also question the wisdom of selling an outright lethal brew. That can’t be good for business.
You may recall the US government intentionally attempted to taint bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Also, foaming at the mouth isn’t a symptom of methanol poisoning.