81–90 of 109 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminal gangs selling bootleg liquor will sometimes sell contaminated product.
There's no such thing as a criminal gang selling bootleg liquor without a government prohibition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotropic_distillation You can't distill ethanol to 100%, only 95%. To get the last 5% of water out you typically add benzene or cyclohexane, which remains as a trace contaminant in the final product. Also note that methanol (and other unsavory small molecules) normally contaminate distilled ethanol unless you actively take steps to remove them. For something you intend to drink, you…
I naively walked around this planet giving the benefit of the doubt to anything and everything as well, for a long, long time.
OTOH, governments sure love alcohol. Consumption and VAT tax adds to 50% on hard alcohol. There's a lot of profit to be made. Gov makes many times more than the actual producer. Denaturation is just a way of pleasing industrial users, while keeping the exorbiant profits from drinkers. If they could, they would tax the industrial users too. It's a blood money because of artificially increased incetives for unsafe prod…
The thing is, alcohol taxes are too low. There are huge social costs of alcohol use and alcoholism, ranging from direct health risks, to drunk driving and assault. The taxes on alcohol (unlike the taxes on cigarettes) do not even come close to matching the social costs of alcohol. For references, look at Mark Kleiman's work. So no, the taxes are not blood money, though I suspect adding methyl alcohol to industrial al…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, alcohol taxes are too low. There are huge social costs of alcohol use and alcoholism, ranging from direct health risks, to drunk driving and assault. The taxes on alcohol (unlike the taxes on cigarettes) do not even come close to matching the social costs of alcohol. For references, look at Mark Kleiman's work. So no, the taxes are not blood money, though I suspect adding methyl alcohol to industrial al…
Are alcohol tax revenues being used to mitigate these negative effects? Or are you simply suggesting that the tax should be increased to lower the amount of (legal) alcohol consumed?
The alcohol used as torpedo propellant was that was often used by sailors to make "torpedo juice" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_juice ) so that ended up being tainted as well to render it undrinkable. That was also a severely misguided effort.
I'm always kind of amused by the effort people will put into getting drunk throughout history.
OTOH, governments sure love alcohol. Consumption and VAT tax adds to 50% on hard alcohol. There's a lot of profit to be made. Gov makes many times more than the actual producer. Denaturation is just a way of pleasing industrial users, while keeping the exorbiant profits from drinkers. If they could, they would tax the industrial users too. It's a blood money because of artificially increased incetives for unsafe prod…
The thing is, alcohol taxes are too low. There are huge social costs of alcohol use and alcoholism, ranging from direct health risks, to drunk driving and assault. The taxes on alcohol (unlike the taxes on cigarettes) do not even come close to matching the social costs of alcohol. For references, look at Mark Kleiman's work. So no, the taxes are not blood money, though I suspect adding methyl alcohol to industrial al…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, if you're a 45kg woman and you take six pills in an evening and then drink 10 liters of water, you'll die. If you get crushed in a crowd surge, you might die. Blaming those on MDMA specifically is usually fatuous though, even if it was a precursor. It's like saying that eating McDonalds is implicated in street racing deaths because some people who die in street races do so with McDonalds wrappers in the car.
If I take a drug that induces me to drink 10 litres of water, am I at fault for drinking 10 litres of water or does the drug have some culpability?
That's not to say it's for everybody (people with heart defects probably shouldn't mess with it, and IIRC it can deplete serotonin in the long run if overused), but the main risks appear to come from those who take large doses and/or mix it with other drugs (through their own fault or by a dealer cutting it with something else).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, if you're a 45kg woman and you take six pills in an evening and then drink 10 liters of water, you'll die. If you get crushed in a crowd surge, you might die. Blaming those on MDMA specifically is usually fatuous though, even if it was a precursor. It's like saying that eating McDonalds is implicated in street racing deaths because some people who die in street races do so with McDonalds wrappers in the car.
We can very well blame those deaths on MDMA, because the causality is clear. If you take six pills of anything that exists in pill form and you die, then assuming one pill is something of a standard dose, that means that chemical has a low therapeutic index and is therefore dangerous.
The alcohol used as torpedo propellant was that was often used by sailors to make "torpedo juice" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_juice ) so that ended up being tainted as well to render it undrinkable. That was also a severely misguided effort.
I'm always kind of amused by the effort people will put into getting drunk throughout history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotropic_distillation You can't distill ethanol to 100%, only 95%. To get the last 5% of water out you typically add benzene or cyclohexane, which remains as a trace contaminant in the final product. Also note that methanol (and other unsavory small molecules) normally contaminate distilled ethanol unless you actively take steps to remove them. For something you intend to drink, you…
Your chemistry is solid, but your argument depends on the poisons being a natural fermentation byproduct rather than an federally mandated addition done at extra cost to the producer. In fact, the government increased the required level of methanol with the explicit goal of making it too difficult to remove completely. They did this conscious of the fact that those who drank the improperly purified product would be blinded or killed, and justified this by pointing out that the consumption was illegal.
But whatever, Slate says it was a conspiracy to poison poor people, I'm sure that's the right explanation
Slate published the article, but the author is extremely well credentialed: Pulitzer Prize, director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, author of a recent book on the topic: http://deborahblum.com/Author.html. You can read the introduction to relevant chapter from the book here: https://books.google.com/books?id=O2HqmJtFkDIC&pg=PT76&lpg=P...