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Why would people mix in methanol to drinking alcohol? Why kill your customers?
Small amounts of methanol can go unnoticed (for a time) and not kill you. They likely cut it incorrectly. Could also have just been an accident
Yeah. Methanol itself isn't terrible for you and would be removed by your kidneys. The problem is that your liver breaks it down into a whole pile of horrendous stuff like formaldehyde, which will blind you if not kill you outright. Your body breaks down ethanol for preference to methanol, so the hospital treatment is to get as much methanol out as possible with a stomach pump, and then waking you up every hour for several days to slam vodka shots till you've pissed away all the meths. Alternatively, if you are just a massive alcoholic, you're likely to have enough ethanol in your system at all times that a bit of meths will pass straight through you.
Normal brewing of beers and things will produce unpleasant side products, methanols and fusel oils, which are not harmful in those concentrations. Normal distilling practice is to discard the first and last things that are produced in the still, so that you don't build therm up. Either an incompetent distiller, or someone wanting to maximise profits by discarding as little as possible, has produced a bad cut and killed a lot of people.
Improperly managed distillation process. Methanol comes off at a lower temp and they apparently didn’t correctly separate it from the alcohol.
You'd have to run industrial scale distilling to get enough methanol off sugar fermentation to be dangerous.
Locals told the AP they suspected a popular herbal drink with high alcohol content, known as “Monkey Tail,” was mixed with methanol, causing the deaths.
A trader who sells the concoction in Odigbo, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being arrested, told the AP there are two versions of Monkey Tail: an original, safe version, and another version which is unsafe.
I've understood that's a myth. In a solution of both methanol and ethanol, both their boiling points changes based on their respective concentrations, hence it's really hard to separate the two. Most brews however contain a very small amount of methanol, and as long as the ethanol content in a couple of magnitudes higher, the methanol is safe to consume