Summary
Four people have died, including 19-year-old Australian Bianca Jones, two Danish women in their 20s, and a 56-year-old US citizen, after suspected methanol poisoning in Vang Vieng, a popular backpacker destination in Laos.
Several others, including six British and one New Zealand traveler, remain hospitalized.
The poisoning is believed to be linked to free shots offered at a local bar, prompting warnings from travelers to avoid local spirits.
Authorities fear a mass poisoning, with investigations underway into the source of the contaminated drinks.
Few points:
Depending what’s being fermented the quantity of methanol can be quite low. Most “sugar wash” type home distillations are quite low in methanol. Certain fruits can yield higher but this isn’t the cheap “moonshine” you’d find and even then it’s unlikely to poison someone in the volume present.
The distillation process doesn’t add methanol, nor ethanol, just concentrates it by boiling it off and leaving behind the higher boiling water etc. Drinking any fermented natural alcohol still results in the consumption of some methanol. In fact if you look up your local regulations, every country has an acceptable amount of methanol they allow in commercial products. Drinking a distilled product concentrates what is already present, so binge drinking it can result in more consumption of methanol as a by product, but doesn’t magically make some shots deadly.
Most home distillers err* on the side of caution and throw away their foreshots and heads “just in case” and also often take the end of a distillation run (tails) and keep those out of their hooch as well.
It’s not exactly “easy to fuck up” to the point you poison someone with methanol, though to be fair to you this is a pretty wide spread myth.