2016 Irkutsk mass methanol poisoning

In December 2016, 74 people died in a mass methanol poisoning in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia, Russia. Precipitated by drinking counterfeit surrogate alcohol, the death toll led one news agency to call it "unprecedented in its scale".

While Russia is one of the highest consumers of alcohol per capita in the world, the use of non-traditional surrogate alcohols rapidly rose in the 2010s due to ongoing economic difficulties in Russia. With a price far below that of government-regulated vodka, surrogates reached an estimated height of twenty percent of the country's alcohol consumption by 2016. These products were often nearly pure alcohol that could be diluted to a rough approximation of vodka, and were frequently available at all hours via strategically placed vending machines. In the Irkutsk incident, the victims drank scented bath lotion that was mislabeled as containing drinkable ethanol.

In the aftermath of the poisoning, regulations on products being used as surrogate alcohols were tightened around the country. Politicians announced a temporary ban on non-food items with more than 25 percent alcohol, and health officials publicly mooted imposing a state monopoly on Russia's perfume and pharmaceutical industries.

In the 2010s, Russia's economy suffered from a financial crisis, depressed oil prices, and international sanctions put into place during the Ukrainian crisis. With less disposable income to spend, citizens were forced to take drastic measures. In 2017, for instance, approximately half of the country's population was growing fruits and vegetables to supplement their diet, caused in part by a doubling in food prices in the preceding two years.

For alcohol, these citizens—already one of the highest consumers per capita in the world—turned to surrogates, a cheaper but unregulated segment of the alcohol market. Russia's deputy prime minister remarked that such non-traditional alcohol made up twenty percent of the total consumed in the country, a figure backed up by independent reporting from the Moscow Times, which noted that the total was still growing. Such a large consumption of unregulated alcohol led to a "regular occurrence" of alcohol poisonings, but the death toll in this single incident led the Associated Press news agency to call it "unprecedented in its scale".

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