How can moonshine cause blindness?
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As far as I know it’s rather hard to go blind from a crudely distilled spirit. As others have said, blindness would usually indicate methanol poisoning. This could come in a few ways:
* Criminals or stupid people adding industrial alcohols to increase profits. This is probably the most common.
* Fermenting materials that produce high methanol, like unripe fruit, especially at higher temperatures for long time periods.
* Using an efficient still that can partially separate methanol from ethanol, and then drinking the methanol rich fractions by themselves. This isn’t too easy with primitive equipment, but criminal gangs might run better gear and not care about safety.
Obviously, the risk from the second two factors multiplies — even with a backyard pot still, you could probably get a really nasty cut of fruit brandy.
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