Who's heard of the Yellow Death?

What happened was that the Russian government bumped up the tax on vodka considerably, so people began buying illegal moonshine instead.

Suddenly, people started turning yellow and dying all over Russia. Once you turned yellow, you'd be dead within a year.

It turned out that some assholes were using an alcohol cleaning product to make vodka, rather than producing it the old fashioned way, and selling it on to unlucky victims. Trace additives in the product cause liver (or was it kidney?) damage. One shot of this stuff sealed your fate.

I learnt about this in a documentary. It was heart-rending to see a single mother go to the doctor and be told that she would be dead within a year. She will be dead by now.

Something to think about when you're choosing what cleaning product to use for your next extraction... I wonder if stuff like this happens in the entheogen community too

Sorry for the morbid post!

I think exposure to the morbid and dark side of human life is integral to our development.

And yes things like this are definately very sad. I don't know if things like this have happened in the entheogen community, but I wouldn't doubt it. But stuff like this happens everyday in the meth and heroin communities.

SWIM has a whole chemistry set of dodgy cleaning products!
Bloody prohibitionists. It's a sad state of affairs.

Methanol tainted vodka has appeared not infrequently on the UK black-market also. Buyer beware...

I think buying anything, when you're not sure of the purity, or chemical content of the supposed product is a horrible idea.

This doesn't just stand for tainted vodka. It can stand for almost any drug. Just know your dealers, and wherever you get it from. If you're not sure what it is, don't buy it.

I doubt knowing your dealer makes you safe. Safer perhaps, but not safe. I doubt a dealer really knows what's in it, not even what it was cut with before it was sold on to him/her. Peasants extract cocaine using normal gasoline (with all the carcinogenic additives included) in big plastic barrels. Peasants in the jungle, not chemists in laboratories. I've seen it on film.

I agree about knowing what's in it but this proves problematic when hunting household chemicals for extractions without a chemistry degree. Even the purest cleaning products are only about 95-99% pure, and the certificates don't tell you what the other 5-1% is. When hunting acetone, a supplier asserted to SWIM that their acetone wasn't reclaimed unlike other sellers' product. Acetone is used for all manner of dodgy chemistry, such as in the manufacture of the dreaded carcinogen bisphenol-A, so this is worrying to SWIM (bisphenol-A is a softening chemical for plastics which is now banned in the West but keeps cropping up in products from China etc, and the health concerns about it is a who's-who of Western disease).

What would be AMAZING would be a stickied thread on pure products, where the chemists on here would list those products used as extraction ingredients that are known to be uncontaminated by additives etc.
As most chemists on here are American, unfortunately SWIM in the UK has to blindly find his own alternatives rather than use what they use.
It would probably be incredibly beneficial to the health of many of the non-chemists, some of whom are doing extractions with products such as Colemans fuel with its bright blue rust additive. God knows what other less obvious chemicals are lurking in ingredients.
Pretty please

Ah, making things harder for people to get makes people turn to alternative (and frequently less safe) products...

This is common around the world even in the US.

Make safe drugs illegal and kids start huffing glue.