Pine Tree Tapping in Siberia with Special Reference to Alcohol Consumption

Pine Tree Tapping in Siberia with Special Reference to Alcohol Consumption a nationwide source of cheap alcoholic beverages The quality of sold alcohol seems to have improved since approximately the last decade (Figure Some papers create an impression that consumers deliberately purchase surrogates for drinking According to our observations and generally known facts, drinking of technical liquids and lotions has decreased abruptly after the end of the antialcohol campaign in 1989, when vodka, beer and other beverages have become easily available and relatively cheap The only major exceptions are medicinal and technical alcohol purloined at some workplaces as well as alcohol-containing liquids from the pharmacy. Many alcohol-dependent people go to the pharmacy not because of the lower price but as they hope to obtain quality alcohol i.e. better purified than vodka from the bottle store. Converted to absolute alcohol, the tinctures from pharmacies are currently more expensive than the cheapest vodka. Recently it was reported on 77 dead from a mass poisoning in Irkutsk. According to the Russian sources summarized in Wikipedia [7, There is a suspicion, however, that the poisoning was caused by the hawthorn (Crataegus) tincture from the pharmacy, containing 70% ethanol, prescribed by drops to patients with cardiac diseases (Figure The hawthorn tincture is the most common form of medicinal alcohol drunk in Russia The author has not found any information neither on the hawthorn bath lotion nor generally on bath lotions containing 93% ethanol. Apparently, there has been misinformation intended to disguise the fact that methanol (or another surrogate) was used for production of the hawthorn tincture as a cheaper substitute for medicinal alcohol. Moreover, mass poisonings with liver injury caused by disinfectant sold in vodka bottles, discussed in [2], could have been caused by admixture of "chloride compounds" [4] i.e. organochlorides.