The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.
Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.
Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
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I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
I wonder whether government testing actually makes a material difference in food/beverage safety.
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).
The methanol doesn't "come out in the heads" and batch size doesn't affect the final concentration as a % because roughly the same ratio is present during a run with a slight in crease in the tails due to the with methanol bonds with water.
Interestingly, after looking at this more closely, what I said is true of rakija, which is what I'm most familiar with (part of my family is Serbian), but appears to not be significantly true for grain distillates. Your sources mostly don't address these topics though; the latter one is mainly about copper and lead levels.
Small-scale distillation is fine. Ten bottles of wine have 500mg of methanol, which is mostly fine for most people even if it all ends up in the same shot -- which it won't; it'll be split between 1-2 750ml bottles even if you do absolutely nothing to remove it from the ethanol.
There is precisely 0 methanol risk in distilling grain based alcohol. The quantity of methanol produced is minuscule a the antidote is ethanol which is also present. Any methanol poisoning is from adulteration with industrial alcohol which has large volumes of methanol added intentionally to make it undrinkable.
Most of methanol poisoning during the Prohibition happened because the government deliberately poisoned ethanol supplies, to prevent them from being converted to drinking spirits. This insane policy caused 10 to 50 thousands deaths. There's no good data about how many died from moonshine methanol poisoning, but likely, outside of prohibition years, the numbers are in low tens per year.
If the original 1868 law stated $10,000, that’s insane (equivalent of millions, these days). If not, then that might mean this law has been regularly reviewed and updated, so it’s not just something that was lost in the back of the cabinet.
For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
Generally, majority of bans are wrong. Excessive freedom limitations limit personal development and economic growth. For thousands of years people were brewing, cooking and making things at home. People dying from car accidents, yet we do not ban cars, don't we? Because cars have major utility value plus play huge part in economy. At the same time, some forces pent decades fighting tobacco companies, destroying true American and British business icons. And somehow replaced them with proliferation all kinds of narcotics and dangerous chemical vapes, which earn huge revenues for literal potential military enemies, and with chemical sin food, water and air, which kill people more than tobacco did. Which suggests it could have been more about money/geopolitics rather than people's safety.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadEvery travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
---
I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
The methanol doesn't "come out in the heads" and batch size doesn't affect the final concentration as a % because roughly the same ratio is present during a run with a slight in crease in the tails due to the with methanol bonds with water.
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0b9...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...
Methanol poisoning comes from tainted consumables.
If the original 1868 law stated $10,000, that’s insane (equivalent of millions, these days). If not, then that might mean this law has been regularly reviewed and updated, so it’s not just something that was lost in the back of the cabinet.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
(I argued both cases.)
[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[1] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...