00:00Adulterated alcohol, the invisible market.
00:03Imagine a bottle of alcohol.
00:04It looks like a normal bottle, without the alcohol.
00:07and sometimes carries a perfectly credible label.
00:10However, it may not contain only ethanol.
00:14It may contain methanol or other dangerous contaminants.
00:18Welcome to the invisible market of illicit alcohol.
00:22According to the World Health Organization,
00:24about a quarter of the alcohol consumed in the world is unregistered.
00:28Homemade or illegal production, smuggling and alcohol escaping official controls.
00:34The risk increases when production and distribution go completely underground.
00:40Let's take Iran.
00:41Alcohol is prohibited there, but that does not prevent the existence of a parallel market.
00:45Ethanol is the alcohol normally found in alcoholic beverages.
00:49Methanol, on the other hand, is an alcohol used particularly in industry.
00:53It is much more dangerous and can cause serious poisoning.
00:57including neurological and visual damage.
01:00The problem is that it is difficult to distinguish methanol and ethanol simply by taste or smell.
01:06And in Iran, the phenomenon was directly observed.
01:10During a mass poisoning in Bojnour in 2018,
01:13116 illegally produced alcoholic beverages were analyzed.
01:17Methanol was detected in 39.6% of the samples.
01:22while 66.4% contained ethanol.
01:25Only 6.9% contained both methanol and ethanol.
01:30This shows that some illicit products can be very different.
01:34of the alcoholic beverage that the consumer thinks they are buying.
01:37But methanol is not the only danger.
01:39Unregistered alcohol analyses may also look for acetaldehyde.
01:44certain higher alcohols, heavy metals, ethyl carbamate or certain phthalates.
01:49And the problem extends far beyond the Middle East.
01:52Adulterated alcohol is neither exclusively Muslim, nor exclusively linked to countries that prohibit alcohol.
01:58It can appear wherever clandestine production exists.
02:02substitute product and circuit escaping sanitary control.
02:06The real question, therefore, is not which country produces the best or worst alcohol,
02:11but rather what proportion of the market escapes sanitary control.
02:15Is there any traceability?
02:17How important is the informal market?
02:19Have any cases of methanol poisoning been documented?
02:23And do we have enough data to actually measure the phenomenon?
02:27This is where the world map becomes interesting.
02:30Heavily regulated markets, artisanal and informal alcohol.
02:34Black markets, documented cases of methanol poisoning.
02:38And regions where data is still insufficient.
02:40Here is the world map, with green indicating where alcohol is best controlled.
02:45and the lowest risk of adulteration, progressing from yellow to orange and then to red,
02:50where contamination and illicit alcohol present the highest risks.
