White Lightning

I’ve often said “never get between the government and tax money,” because they will break any law and stomp all over the Constitution to get it. Grain alcohol that is sold for industrial cleaning, etc, has to be “denatured” by law. What is involved in denaturing? A poison is added that will kill you if you drink it. The *government* does this. By law. Can you imagine if Microsoft designed Windows so that pirated copies would blow up and kill you?
And don’t get me started on the BATFE. They are this amazing combination of incompetence and overkill (the whole case at Waco was over the possible misregistration of ONE gun). And as an example of incompetence….
I was watching an episode of COPS many years ago. They were raiding a house that had been set up to grow pot plants, and a BATFE agent had been brought along. No one was there, but while clearing the house, the BATFE agent pointed to a home beer brewing setup and said: “That there is an illegal still that you can make alcohol with. Very dangerous, because if you don’t do it right, you make this kind of alcohol that can kill you.”
Where to begin?
First, it wasn’t a still–it was a very typical home brewing setup for beer. It’s true you can make alcohol with it, just not distilled alcohol.
Second, if you are distilling a fermented mash of whatever kind–corn, barley, fruit–all that you can extract is ethanol, because that’s all that is in there. You cannot make “the kind of alcohol that can kill you” (I assume he was talking about methanol). It just isn’t there.
Third, if he was going to get all excited about the possibility of someone dying from drinking methanol, he needs to take it to his boss. The BATFE is responsible for overseeing the denaturing of grain alcohol, which is done by adding…methanol.
So there you go. This guy is supposed to be an expert, and yet he is blatantly clueless. It’s a good thing there weren’t any poor potheads in the house. They’d probably have been locked up for a federal felony and this idiot would be testifying in court about that “illegal still.”