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Filip Singer / EPA
A vendor covers shelves filled with hard alocohol at a shop in Prague, Czech Republic, on Friday. The Czech government banned the sale of hard alcohol in the wake of a series of deaths linked to such drinks. Health Minister Leos Heger made the announcement in a television broadcast. The ban would apply for the foreseeable future to all liquor with an alcohol content of more than 20 per cent. The announcement comes after at least 19 deaths linked to people who drank vodka or rum drinks spiked with methanol, which can cause illness in small quantities and blindness or death in larger doses.
David W Cerny / Reuters
Workers puts tape to close an aisle with hard liquor in a supermarket in Prague on Friday. The Czech Health Ministry on Friday indefinitely banned the sale of drinks containing more than 20 percent alcohol after 19 people died from drinking bootleg spirits containing poisonous methanol, the CTK news agency reported.
David W Cerny / Reuters
A bartender covers bottles of hard liquor with towels in a bar in Prague .
Zdenek Nemec / AP
A policeman leads a man accused in the case of illegal alcohol to the court in Zlin, Czech Republic, 150 miles east of Prague on Friday. His arrest is in connection with the latest police discovery. Around 500 bottles and several barrels of illicit booze were found in a garage in the eastern city of Zlin on Thursday. Eighteen people have recently died after drinking liquor tainted with methanol (methyl alcohol) in the Czech Republic.
AP reports that the Czech Republic has banned the sale of spirits with more than 20 percent alcohol amidst methanol poisonings:
Dozens of people have been hospitalized, some in critical condition after drinking vodka and rum laced with methanol. The problem has appeared largely centered in northeastern Czech Republic.
Methanol is mainly used for industrial purposes, but unscrupulous criminal networks sometimes misuse it to illegally produce cheap liquor because it's cheap and impossible to distinguish from real drinking alcohol.
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Not only in the Czech Republic. Methanol laced alcohol are distributed around the world, mostly exported from China.
Ok, I'm confused. How does banning liquors with more than 20 percent alcohol stop unscrupulous criminals from adding Methanol to every thing else?
...If they ban the sale of the legal stuff, doesn't that encourage MORE bootleg stuff?
Beer and wine is enough to get a real buzz going do not need anything stronger anyway. I can see the days of bootlegging booze coming back only not here in the old USA ha !
Moonshine production has been has never stopped! Just in smaller quantities. Get your head out of your A$#
Banning name-brand hard liquor along with the tainted stuff seems a lot like banning guns from law-abiding citizens while law breakers, of course, will keep theirs.
Again....are these people NUTS? Where is the ABC?? Seems if your importing FINLANDIA how does that affect the booze? Methanol where 4 art thou?? NUTS guess they will just stop drinking the good stuff....................................and so it goes...........................
And this is just one of the MANY reasons why regulations are important.
Capitalism, just like anything else, must have controls in place to prevent the inherent greed and corruption in humans.
jd4u
As though capitalism is at fault in this story.You guys are incredible ! Your hatred for the system that gave you everything you have is only surpassed by your own self hatred.If our system had too much of a strain on you,maybe you should seek residence in another,less capitalistic country.Try Venezeula,Cuba or one of the european countries.There you dont have to work but still get paid and you can live out your utopean life,reading Marx ,,Engels, Jungor ,Mao or Lenin,waiting for the revolution to start!Good luck,comrade!
Hmmm, ban legal alcohol because someone was trying to skirt duties and taxes by selling poison.
Oh you silly Cheks, this will not end well.
Ever think the ban is a temp one that gives them times to inspect these shops for the methanol tainted alcohol? Or did you just run to Newsvine real quick with some retarded prohibition comment burning in your head?
Forbidding the sale of liquor containing over 20% alcohol is only going to encourage the illegal import and sale of those liquors. A more effective approach would be to tax the hell out of liquor containing over 20% alcohol. In other words, make it cost prohibitive for most people.