US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

Depends in which country you reside. Where I am the denaturants methanol and pyridine were removed decades ago and replaced with the nontoxic bitterant denatonium.

Against my will!

> There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.

That's why I pay for stuff, and other people pay me. That's how money is supposed to work. It coordinates communities.

Obviously there are downsides too, but booze is popular for very good reasons.

There are many studies a quick google away that show a much more nuanced take ie [0] and [1]. But the strongest evidence is our most successful societies and civilizations have been intentionally drinking alcohol for ~10000 years [2]. If it was only detrimental then I'm pretty sure it would have worked its way out by now. I acknowledge there are negative issues.

[0]: https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-skinny-cocktails [1]: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-drinks/drin... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_beverages

I don't have stats on hand, but I seem to remember that smoking costs much more than alcohol, despite a sizeable (1/3? not sure) proportion of car accidents being caused by the latter. Alcohol and drug use is already considered an aggravating circumstance in some situations (car crashes, assault, etc).

But yeah, I think there are activities that are clearly extremely risky and some that are clearly not. I guess alcohol lies somewhere in the middle: I never felt compelled to drive after drinking; I usually just zone out on my couch or go to bed.

There's also the fact that alcohol seems pretty much unstoppable. See how well prohibition worked in the US. Ditto for drugs and smoking, where, despite our local flavor of "war on drugs", cannabis consumption has exploded in recent years. Taxes on tobacco are extremely high here, yet many people still smoke. I understand smoking is relatively less popular than before, but people do still smoke. Alcohol consumption has also gone down, but people do still drink. Despite the communication campaigns that they're not healthy.

So I think that since there are some activities in which people tend to engage in anyway, even if they're outlawed (cannabis comes to mind), we, as a society, should figure out ways to mitigate that. Have people be accountable. Wanna do stupid shit? Knock yourself out, but don't have society bear the burden.

I don't know, as someone who mostly rides motorbikes, I wouldn't be shocked if I had to pay a premium at the hospital if I left half my face on the pavement in a crash because I figured wearing a helmet, or even serious equipment, was somehow not cool, or whatever people tell themselves to justify riding next to naked. Yes, I wear all my gear even under 40ºC. Even in the US desert, where I understand helmet wear is not mandatory. Yes, I sweat. I've only ever had a minor crash despite riding a big-ass "dangerous" crotch rocket, but I enjoy having my skin attached to my body more than not sweating. Should I pay a (lower?) premium anyway, since motorbikes are statistically more dangerous than walking? Maybe?

It's entertaining for some people.

While it is true that any amount of alcohol is technically bad for you, 'the dose makes the poison'. Drinking in moderation is relatively harmless. For example, 2 drinks / day raises one's risk of colon cancer by 6%, but that's a relative increase on top of one's ~ 4.4% lifetime risk (which also includes drinkers, so we could be double counting). So you're increasing lifetime risk to 4.7%. Do it for all cancers and you're likely increasing your total risk of death by ~ 1%. Things really only go exponential beyond ~ 20d/wk

So you have to ask yourself, is your enjoyment of the occasional beer worth the very low increased risk? For myself, the answer is yes, but I would not dream of making that decision for someone else, and I object to the government doing it for me.

Insurance should insure your risk, and that's fairly independent of what other people are doing. (Of course, other people driving dangerously can endanger your health, and thus drive up your health insurance costs.)

What you have in mind is probably a consequence of forbidding insurance companies from charging people according to risk, and forcing them to charge people some average of a pool they are placed in?

Plenty of people would agree they're willing to pay taxes and give governments the authority to build and maintain public roads, for example. That doesn't mean they would also then be okay with government taking over industry.

This hasn't been my experience in the US over the last couple decades. Both parties like to complain about the other side, but they both spend money we don't have and are happy to fund new government programs as long as its their party's program.

Yes. It's not even a continuum: it has more than one dimension.

Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first".

Here's more info if you're interested https://fx5.com/dispelling-misconceptions-about-methanol-hea...

"Methanol poisoning can be treated with fomepizole or ethanol.[19][22][23] Both drugs act to reduce the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition. Ethanol, the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, acts as a competitive inhibitor by more effectively binding and saturating the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, thus blocking the binding of methanol. Methanol is excreted by the kidneys without being converted into the toxic metabolites formaldehyde and formic acid. "

So completely correct.

>Alcohol fermented from fruit byproduct is extremely common in many cultures. It is asinine to think that only grain will be used once this is legalised.

Not what I was saying at all. You could use grain, or sugar (cheapest and easiest). That said, the levels are not significantly high enough to poison you unless someone is trying to poison you. It's not happening when making alcohol to drink.

From the link you posted

>Administering patients with controlled doses of either ethanol or fomepizole is standard practice.

Again, what I said is completely correct, your own source confirmed it.

Secondly, also from the article

>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.

Again, as I said, someone intentionally trying to poison you.

And here's an actual study

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...

>Both commercial and home-distilled alcohols exhibited methanol concentrations remarkably below the 0.35 % limit for brandy set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

You're simply misinformed.

EDIT: Ahh! I was basing my statement on data from quite a number of years back, and just assuming prices tend to go in one direction in inflationary economies. The nuance here is that the NOK has weakened somewhat dramatically against the dollar, so relative prices aren't quite as insane now as they were in the past.

I don't think so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope_tables

methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.

furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.

last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.

There is always some amount of vapor pressure, even below the boiling point of a substance. Otherwise, neither water nor alcohol would evaporate by themselves at room temperature! The temperature we call the "boiling point" is just the temperature at which the vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure.

This also matches what happens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afterwards.

If you’re trying to get drunk cheaply, and without tasting liquor, you cannot beat the product and efficiency of a column still.

But I want my whiskey or apple brandy to have the characteristics of the mash I distill it from. A column still would reduce that.

So most home distilling is a pot still for sure.

As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.

But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.

I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.

So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.

Ethanol can be used as a temporary measure in methanol poisoning as it temporarily outcompetes methanol in the metabolic process. So it's only useful until proper medical help arrives when better alternatives such as fomepizole are administered. Even then there is no guarantee of success.

Methanol is still metabolized to dangerous formaldehyde and formic acid by the liver's alcohol dehydrogenase. The logic of giving ethanol or fomepizole is to slow down the rate of production methanol's dangerous metabolic byproducts so less damage is done, nevertheless those dangerous metabolites are still produced.

Ethanol's first-pass metabolite is acetaldehyde and it is still toxic but not to the same degree as those of methanol.

It is incorrect to say ethanol is an antidote for methanol poisoning. Using ethanol is a last-ditch stand to try and take some minor control of an otherwise out of control situation. There's nothing subtle about it—it's a blunderbuss approach that often doesn't work well because replacing one poison with a less toxic one is a pretty hit-and-miss process.

Antidotes counteract poisons, that's not what happens when you give ethanol in methanol poisonings.

Many people enjoy drinking beer and wine. These are undistilled.

Vodka and whiskey are examples of distilled beverages.

Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.

Thanks for the info.

Same could be said about food: dishes, knives etc. Anyway the high temperature should kill some of the germs.

> the precursor fruits could be half rotten

So what?