First, for all of you who don’t know what “bay rum” is-it is a cheap men’s cologne. It is basically, alcohol, water, that has the essence of west indian bay leaves in it.
The smell is kinda nice-those of you who have had haircuts at an old-time barber shop probably remember it.
At any rate, when I was an undergraduate, I worked summers at a local warehouse. The foreman there was an old Italian-American guy, who had spent 34 years in the US Army.
He was stationed in the Canal Zone (Panama), and related how boring the duty was…so lots of guys took to drinking. He told me that a lot of the enlisted men would drink bay rum (with lime juice and sugar to kill the taste)-apparently, it was dirt cheap in Panama. It was also potent (about 60% alcohol).
So was bay rum a preferred drink for winos with little money?
Well seeing that Sterno has some additive to make it taste awful to discourage people from drinking it, I’m quite confident that winos would drink Bay Rum if it was cheap enough and they couldn’t afford fortified wine.
Maybe they shouldn’t have named it after a drink?
Alcohol in fragrances and other products not intended for drinking is usually denatured - this makes it unpalatable (not to mention unsafe), however, unless something like an emetic is included in the denaturing mix, anyone stupid and determined enough would still be able to drink it.
The denaturant in bay rum is usually the bay oil itself (10 lbs per 100 gallons); if you can ignore that, yeah, nothing’s stopping you. Sterno, OTOH, is denatured with methanol, which is quite toxic.
From what I’ve been reading in that other thread, they could take the Bay Rum in enema form.
Well, at least their toots would smell nice.
The rules about denaturing alcohol are probably quite different in Panama.
It was a big thing towards the end of the USSR when Gorbachev started trying to get Russians to drink less. Since vodka(and other drinkable alcoholic beverages) was harder to get, people started looking for alternatives. One of those was cologne, aftershave and various alcohol based medicines. Moonshine was the other major source of illegal alcohol. To an extent this still continues today since the alcohol in aftershave and medication isn’t taxed as much and a lot of Russian alcoholics are very poor.