The trail of destruction left by rise in methanol- laced alcohol

For Bethany Clarke, poison tasted like nothing. There was no bitter aftertaste, no astringent sting at the back of the tongue.

- Tess McClure MANILA Tiago Rogero and William Christou

If anything, she thought in passing, the free shots she and her friends were drinking at a hostel bar in Laos had probably been watered down - she wasn’t detecting a strong vodka flavour through the veil of Sprite she had mixed it with.

All in all, Clarke remembers drinking about five of those shots, sitting with her best friend, Simone White, and a crowd of others at the hostel’s happy hour. CCTV footage shows the group laughing in the warm air of the open bar in the town of Vang Vieng. But by the next evening, they were in hospital. Shortly afterwards, White was dead.

Clarke describes the awful aftermath of those drinks in blunt, matter-of-fact detail. Waking up, with what they assumed were grinding hangovers. A tour-bus ride where those symptoms grew worse, ending with White vomiting and Clarke fainting, hitting her head. The debate over whether it was food poisoning, a hangover, a virus. Someone in the group finally deciding it was time to find a hospital. The gradual, creeping realisation, as they waited in the ward, that something was badly wrong, that White in particular was getting sicker. Hearing her breathing shift to short gasps. The news that her brain was swelling, crushing into her skull. Finally, her life support being turned off.

"That was 21 November, so a year ago, that they turned the machine off," Clarke, who is from the UK but living in Brisbane, said. "It was honestly just a living nightmare." White, also British, was one of six tourists who died in the 2024 Laos poisoning, after consuming drinks contaminated with methanol - a cheap, deadly relative of ethanol. In places where spirits are easily available on the black market, poorly regulated, expensive relative to income, or inaccessible because of legal and cultural taboos, it is increasingly finding its way into the alcohol supply chain - with catastrophic consequences. A lethal dose is 30ml. As little as 10ml can cause irreversible blindness.