• InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    9 months ago

    A reddit comment

    West Virginia, where you can make five gallons of moonshine but any amount of recreational marijuana can result in 90 days in prison.

  • GinAndJuche
    ·
    9 months ago

    West Virginia continues being Best Virginia

    union

    moonshine

    not home to spy agencies and guillotine fodder

    • dead [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      That's not why home distillation is illegal. Home distillation was made illegal during prohibition and continued to be illegal because the US government decided to tax all distillation.

      Distillation does not add methanol to alcohol. Methanol can occur naturally during the fermentation of some fruits. Some wines and beers naturally have small amounts of methanol in them. Making wine or beer is already legal in most states. Distillation only removes water from fermented alcohol. Distillation is not really any more dangerous than making your own beer or wine, which is legal in most states already.

      If you click on the links in the google search link that you posted, you can read that all the cases listed were instances were shitty bootleggers had intentionally added poisons to the alcohol. In other words, methanol poisoning occurs when people added methanol to the alcohol after distillation.

      this was one of the top results on the page https://time.com/3665643/deadly-drinking/

      This Time article is about how the US has a history of intentionally adding methanol to untaxed alcohol so that people would die if they drank it. So called "Denatured alcohol".

      So not only does the US not care about people dying from methanol, the US intentionally tried to kill people with methanol for trying to avoid paying taxes.

      • jayWL@lemmy.ml
        ·
        9 months ago

        just to add to this: only way to get methanol poisoning from home distillation is if you drink the "first cup" where methanol tends to concentrate due to its lower boiling temperature. But if you were to mix that cup together with the rest of yhe product, the relative concentration will not be high enough to kill you

    • TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      I came to post something similar. Hopefully the fact that it's legal can allow people to be smarter and safer about home distillation, as a form of harm reduction, but I'm still worried for people who are going to try and do it without the knowledge needed to not drink methanol.