Opinion - Editorials

From slow poison to instant killer

If liquor is a slow poison, then illicit liquor is an instant killer. At least 48 people lost their lives in the border districts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu after consuming an illicit brew suspected to contain methanol-mixed industrial alcohol. The victims, all of them from poor, working class backgrounds, took to the illicit liquor as a cheap alternative to alcohol. Industrial alcohol is mixed with the poisonous methanol to make it unfit for consumption and at the same time to avoid the taxes levied on alcoholic beverages. However, the low-priced industrial alcohol often finds its way into the hands of bootleggers who use it for their own illicit concoctions. The latest killer brew was evidently a result of such diversion, and investigating authorities will need to trace the source of the industrial alcohol. This is not the first time that illicit liquor is found flowing in Kolar in Karnataka, and making its way into Tamil Nadu too. Although huge quantities of illicit liquor are being destroyed and bootleggers arrested from time to time, the business is lucrative enough for those engaged in it to make light of the occasional losses and inconveniences. None of the bootleggers in the area seems to have been deterred by police action.

Governmental responses to such tragedies have been predictable and inadequate. Neither prohibition nor making available cheap liquor — the two stock responses — has been found to be effective. Prohibition was mostly coupled with weak enforcement and inevitably contributed to the spawning of a wide network of illicit distillation and brewing. Authorised cheap liquor was never cheaper than illicit liquor, and was often blamed for initiating new groups of the population into the habit of drinking. Thus, illicit liquor thrived during times of prohibition as well as through periods where cheap and legitimate liquor was readily available. In Tamil Nadu, toddy and arrack are at present banned as their manufacture and sale are difficult to regulate. Indian Made Foreign Spirits are marketed and sold through a State-owned corporation. But these measures have not eliminated the illicit liquor trade, especially in the rural areas. Prohibition almost never works, and liquor remains one of the top revenue-earners for the State governments. However, this reality should not divert them from their duty to protect public health through educational programmes and by creating an awareness of the consequences of drinking, particularly of the danger from illicit brews.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu