If it is 90% ethanol and 10% methanol, would the methanol even matter since the body selectively metabolizes ethanol?
Imagine a hard core alcoholic, would their body ever run out of ethanol to selectively metabolize?
Or am I totally off track here?
“denatured” alcohol doesn’t always contain methanol. it might be some other substance that would make it unfit to drink. They used to use benzene, I understand.
Even if the adulterant is methanol, I wouldn’t go drinking methanol. It’s toxic, and consumption can cause blindness:
Yea to be clear I have no interest in drinking denatured alcohol, I was just curious since the antidote for methanol poisoning is ethanol basically. You keep the body busy metabolizing ethanol until the methanol is passed unmetabolized, it is rather strange methanol was chosen as an adulterant.
My aunt told me of a coworker in her lab who used to enjoy an occasional cheeky nip from an ethanol wash bottle… One day the technician who filled the wash bottles filled the ethanol bottle with methanol by mistake and the crafter drinker not realising that his tipple was now toxic went blind as a result.
Basically, ethanol wasn’t that great of an antidote. The therapeutic window is small, one must keep the Blood Alcohol Content within the target range for an extended time, the tried and true way to use ethanol as an antidote is via IV rather than oral ingestion. In addition, fomepizole is a far superior treatment for methanol poisoning.
The whole idea of denatured alcohol is to provide something that has most of the properties (and cost) of ethanol, but so totally toxic that nobody in their right minds would drink it to get drunk. At least, that’s what I’d always heard, and it’s what Wikipedia says, so it must be true!
I’ve heard some Australian aborigines drink methylated spirits, isn’t that methanol?
No it’s another “mostly ethanol with enough methanol in it to make it toxic” mix.
“Selective” is not “exclusive”. 10% is a shitload of poison to ask your body to ignore.
Not constrained to them, you know when an alco has hit rock bottom when they start drinking metho. The preferred way was to filter it through some white bread. These blokes never lasted very long.
In Australia, it doesn’t even contain methanol. It’s absolute ethanol with trace amounts of foul tasting agents like denatonium or butanol. It tastes like crap, but it’s relatively harmless to drink. Worst symptoms are nausea and a headache.
They stopped selling methylated spirits with methanol precisely because people insisted on drinking the stuff. The replacement is still called metho, but it’s fairly harmless.
Commonly drunk by mixing it with “cordials”. Basically, metho and Kool-Aid. Apparently that helps mask the taste.
The liver produces an enzyme called “alcohol dehydrogenase” that helps metabolize alcohol. When it acts on methanol it produces formaldehyde, which is a poison. The reason that ethanol can be used to treat methanol poisoning is that the liver produces only so much of the enzyme. It’s not that the body selectively metabolizes ethanol - it’s that, with enough ethanol around, a molecule of alcohol dehydrogenase is more likely to encounter a molecule of ethanol than one of methanol. The idea is to keep enough ethanol in the system to slow down the production of formaldehyde long enough to allow the methanol and formaldehyde to be excreted in the urine before harm is done.
An alcoholic drink typically contains about an ounce of alcohol, or about 29.5 ml. If 10% of this is methanol, that would be 2.95 ml per drink. According to the Wikipedia article quoted above, 10 ml of methanol is enough to cause blindness - this would be about 3 1/2 drinks. The lethal dose of 30 ml would be achieved with about 10 drinks. My guess is that, if you chugged all the drinks at once, you might excrete enough unmetabolized methanol to mitigate the damage. If you drank slowly enough to metabolize the alcohol you’d do yourself real harm, regardless of the presence of ethanol.
I’m told that unscrupulous shopkeepers in areas where there are metho drinkers keep it in the fridge to sell chilled; that also masks the taste.
Isn’t there also some special petrol they sell in Aborigine areas that is less harmfull to sniff?
It is called Opal. Its main point is that it contains far fewer aromatic hydrocarbons, which both create the stupefying effect, and cause the damage. So it is both less harmful, and less desirable to sniff.
The answer I was looking for, thank you.