Homemade Alcohol Leads to Brain Death of One Person in Kish

Judicial authorities confirmed reports of casualties resulting from the consumption of counterfeit alcoholic beverages on Kish Island. Mohammad Abbasi, the public and revolutionary prosecutor of Kish, stated on Sunday, April 5, to the Mizan news agency: "According to the provided statistics, about 18 people have so far visited Kish Hospital with similar symptoms," and tests conducted on these individuals revealed the presence of acid in their blood "caused by the consumption of alcoholic beverages." The prosecutor also announced the arrest of three individuals in this regard and mentioned that approximately 300 liters of homemade alcoholic beverages were discovered and destroyed at three locations on the island. Abbasi's statements came hours after the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday afternoon, April 4, citing a hospital official in Kish about the "severe poisoning of three tourists due to homemade alcohol consumption" on the island. Saeed Pourali, the head of the board of trustees of Kish Hospital, indicated that the three individuals were hospitalized in intensive care and noted that "the condition of two of the poisoned individuals is very critical, and they have suffered brain death." According to Pourali, "All the hospital visitors were tourists who had brought these beverages with them via sea routes." This is not the first time that the consumption of non-standard alcoholic beverages has led to poisoning, blindness, or death in Iran. The sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages are considered crimes under the laws of the Islamic Republic, with a punishment of 80 lashes for consumption, which can lead to execution upon repeated offenses. Therefore, there are no accurate statistics on the exact consumption of these beverages, a large portion of which is smuggled into Iran, and various officials have provided conflicting statistics on this matter. In 2013, over 350 people in several cities of Kerman province, including Rafsanjan, were poisoned due to drinking counterfeit alcohol, resulting in the deaths of seven individuals. A few months ago, Mohammad Reza Ghaderzadeh, an official from Iran's forensic medicine, announced that 153 people died in 2016 due to drinking counterfeit alcoholic beverages in the country. According to Ghaderzadeh, "The production of these illegal beverages is conducted underground in the country." He also mentioned the number of deaths resulting from alcohol consumption from 2010 to 2014 as 145, 93, 136, 135, and 81, respectively. Meanwhile, according to Yasna Bahmanesh, secretary of the Central Drug and Poison Information Center, out of 100,000 visits to specialized poisoning treatment hospitals, between two to four percent of poisonings were related to alcoholic beverages. She noted that in some smaller cities, the rate of alcohol poisoning is much higher than this figure. Although there are no accurate statistics on the amount of alcoholic beverages consumed in Iran, Roozbeh Kordouni, the director of the Social Harm Affairs Office at the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare, previously stated that approximately 60 million liters of alcoholic beverages are consumed annually in Iran.