Bootleg booze kills 11 and puts dozens more in hospital with severe poisoning in Iran

Bootleg alcohol has killed 11 people and put dozens more in hospital with severe poisoning in Iran.

Over the past few days the northern province of Mazandaran has been the site of an outbreak of problems caused by the booze, according to Iranian state media.

Iran’s Tasnim news agency said 53 people suffering from ‘ethanol or methanol’ intoxication had been hospitalised since Sunday in the northern province. 

Iran banned the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Smuggled and bootleg alcohol has ever since proliferated on the Iranian black market, with methanol often added to drinks as a cheaper alternative to ethanol.

Iran banned the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Pictured: Demonstrators hold a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini, in January 1979, in Teheran, during a demonstration against the shah

On Sunday Tasnim news agency said four people died of alcohol poisoning in neighbouring Gilan province after 20 were hospitalised. 

So far no arrests have been reported connected to the illegal booze making operation.   

In September 2021, Iran sentenced four people to death over selling poisonous alcohol that killed at least 17 people months earlier.

In May 2022, eight people died in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas after drinking bootleg alcohol. 

At least 210 people died in Iran during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 after drinking bootleg alcohol, falsely believing it to be a remedy for the virus.

However some independent figures put the number closer to 700 bootleg alcohol related deaths during the pandemic.

Alcohol poisoning skyrocketed by some ten times in Iran between 2020 and 2019, according to a government report released in April 2020.

Many during the pandemic also started to drink methanol, a toxic alcohol used for industrial solvent, under the false belief that it could cure the virus.

The Iranian government mandates that manufacturers of toxic methanol add an artificial colour to their products so the public can tell it apart from ethanol, the kind of alcohol that can be used in cleaning wounds.

Some bootleggers in Iran use methanol, adding a splash of bleach to mask the added colour before selling it as drinkable.

Sometimes it is mixed with consumable alcohol to stretch supply, other times it comes as methanol, falsely advertised as drinkable.

Methanol also can contaminate traditionally fermented alcohol.

Methanol cannot be smelled or tasted in drinks. It causes delayed organ and brain damage. Symptoms include chest pain, nausea, hyperventilation, blindness and even coma.