Several decades have passed since interchanging ethanol with methanol was banned in household products that had the potential to come in contact with humans or could be consumed accidentally or deliberately.
Before then—going back many, many decades—cheaply and easily available ethanol (grape spirit) was denatured (rendered undrinkable) by adding to it about 15% methanol (wood alcohol) and (often) 3% of vile bitter-tasting pyridine—both of which were toxic, thus the final mixture was poisonous and (supposedly) undrinkable. (Another advantage of adding methanol and pyridine as denaturants is that both have similar characteristics to ethanol when the mixture is used as a fuel or for cleaning, etc.)
In some places (mainly Commonwealth countries such as the UK, Australia) this mixture was known as methylated spirits and was labelled 'POISON'. The aim of authorities was to deliberately make the mixture very toxic so if you were silly enough to drink it (or were an alcoholic) then you'd suffer the consequences which were blindness and often death. (Right, you can still hear the moralists and wowsers drafting these regulations echoing down the decades.)
Eventually some authorities became enlightenment and replaced the toxic methanol and pyridine denaturants with non-toxic denatonium (aka Bitrex) which, to humans (but not rats), is the world's bitterest known substance. Now, if you could actually drink this terrible bitter-tasting concoction then you wouldn’t go blind or die immediately—instead you'd just suffer long-term alcoholic poisoning like anyone who consumes lots of booze.
(Incidentally, in some countries the ethanol/denatonium (plus 5% water) mixture is still known as methylated spirits and the changeover from the methanol-based one was done surreptitiously and without any public fanfare presumably to deter 'experimentation' among a certain subset of the population.)
Clearly this substitution makes great sense, and it's a widely known fact to just about every chemist on the planet so there's absolutely no excuse to use methanol as a substitute for ethanol under any circumstances where it can be mistaken for ethanol. Using methanol in place of ethanol in a normal household environment ought to be considered a criminal act as it's such a dangerous practice.
The most significant problem with methanol is that it is just too similar to ethanol (it smells like alcoholic ethanol) which makes it difficult to distinguish from the latter, and it's often stored in industrial chemical plants nearby to ethanol which is a recipe for disaster if it's mislabeled or mistaken for ethanol. I'm strongly of the opinion that all methanol ought to have a colored dye tracer added to it (like blue kerosene) the moment it is distilled, fractionated and or hydrogenated.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadSeveral decades have passed since interchanging ethanol with methanol was banned in household products that had the potential to come in contact with humans or could be consumed accidentally or deliberately.
Before then—going back many, many decades—cheaply and easily available ethanol (grape spirit) was denatured (rendered undrinkable) by adding to it about 15% methanol (wood alcohol) and (often) 3% of vile bitter-tasting pyridine—both of which were toxic, thus the final mixture was poisonous and (supposedly) undrinkable. (Another advantage of adding methanol and pyridine as denaturants is that both have similar characteristics to ethanol when the mixture is used as a fuel or for cleaning, etc.)
In some places (mainly Commonwealth countries such as the UK, Australia) this mixture was known as methylated spirits and was labelled 'POISON'. The aim of authorities was to deliberately make the mixture very toxic so if you were silly enough to drink it (or were an alcoholic) then you'd suffer the consequences which were blindness and often death. (Right, you can still hear the moralists and wowsers drafting these regulations echoing down the decades.)
Eventually some authorities became enlightenment and replaced the toxic methanol and pyridine denaturants with non-toxic denatonium (aka Bitrex) which, to humans (but not rats), is the world's bitterest known substance. Now, if you could actually drink this terrible bitter-tasting concoction then you wouldn’t go blind or die immediately—instead you'd just suffer long-term alcoholic poisoning like anyone who consumes lots of booze.
(Incidentally, in some countries the ethanol/denatonium (plus 5% water) mixture is still known as methylated spirits and the changeover from the methanol-based one was done surreptitiously and without any public fanfare presumably to deter 'experimentation' among a certain subset of the population.)
Clearly this substitution makes great sense, and it's a widely known fact to just about every chemist on the planet so there's absolutely no excuse to use methanol as a substitute for ethanol under any circumstances where it can be mistaken for ethanol. Using methanol in place of ethanol in a normal household environment ought to be considered a criminal act as it's such a dangerous practice.
The most significant problem with methanol is that it is just too similar to ethanol (it smells like alcoholic ethanol) which makes it difficult to distinguish from the latter, and it's often stored in industrial chemical plants nearby to ethanol which is a recipe for disaster if it's mislabeled or mistaken for ethanol. I'm strongly of the opinion that all methanol ought to have a colored dye tracer added to it (like blue kerosene) the moment it is distilled, fractionated and or hydrogenated.