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Alcohol differences to know for tincture making
NOTE: If you use 95% alcohol, treat it very carefully. It is a deadly
poison. Use proper ventilation, and keep it locked up, especially if
there are young people around. Inform everyone that if they drink it,
they could slip into a coma, die, or, if they survive might lose their
eyesight.
Actually, this is not true. 95% alcohol is only slightly more
deadly or poisonous than vodka. 100% alcohol will burn the tissues of
the throat if drunk straight and in quantity, but people have survived
this - and there are stories
of people who have done it with some regularity, just to prove
something (the nitwits), as well as stories of people who guzzled too
much plain beer or other mild alcohol and died (a guy a couple of years
ahead of me in high school did that - he started downing beers, one
after another, and died before he finished a six-pack - and it was not
an "urban legend", either - my civics teacher made the announcement),
but that is not normal or to be expected. Certainly people could slip
into a coma if they drink _too much_ alcohol, on the order of fifteen
or more drinks of hard liquor or more than fifteen beers (that is, if
my memory
serves that a blood alcohol of 0.3 is about the right amount to cause
danger and that it goes up by 0.2 percent per drink and that it takes
two hours to metabolize one drink - I am sure these figures are heavily
rounded) - this amount would have to be drunk all at once to cause a
serious problem.
However, no matter how drunk people get, even to the extent of
being "blind drunk", they will _NOT_ loose their eyesight! Even
isopropyl alcohol, which is much more toxic, will not cost people their
eyesight - "wood" alcohol (methanol, a single-carbon alcohol derived
from the destructive distillation of wood) is the alcohol which will
destroy eyesight (isopropanol _can_ cause organ or gastric damage,
though.) Certainly alcohol should be kept out of the reach of children
and pets, as should anything even containing alcohol, but, even more
importantly, children should be educated by a professional concerning
the dangers of alcohol (at least, they should be educated by someone
with a better head on their shoulders than my own parents - most of my
current problems in life are based in the erroneous and purposely
falsified information I was fed as a child ["if you look at the sun,
you'll go blind" resulted in my having a burn across my retina from
staring at the sun, since, once Earl Smith proved that it would not
cause blindness by thus staring, I felt it important to find out what
really did happen, and nobody had told me that it would cause any other
kind of damage].) Ethyl alcohol (drinking alcohol) is extremely
poisonous to cats, resulting in organ damage, so it is especially
appropriate to keep it away from cats.
In case it helps to keep them straight: methanol is wood alcohol,
with just one carbon atom; ethanol is grain alcohol (made from any kind
of starch or sugar by fermentation, or chemically synthesized), and has
two carbons in the chain. Besides carbon, there are only hydrogens
attached except for one OH (oxygen hydrogen, or "hydroxyl" group). In
fact, if this group were _not_ present, the molecule would be a gas -
methane, ethane and propane correspond to the alcohol with a similar
name. In the case of propane, the hydroxyl group can be attached in two
different places - with the hydroxyl attached to the end carbon, it is
called "propanol", but if attached to the center carbon, it is
"isopropanol", or isopropyl alcohol (sometimes known as rubbing
alcohol, if it is in a 70% solution
with water - 70% is required for maximum germicidal action.) When the
OH group is attached to the center carbon, the molecule is called an
"isomer", which is why it is "iso"-propyl (-duh.)
I was going to explain how the solvent nature of these alcohols is
affected by the different molecular configurations, but most people
would probably rather see an end to this message.
Good luck.
Douglas Wiggins
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