Taşkın Erduan thought he’d gotten a bargain: three liters of vodka for around $15. But it took only two glasses to kill the 51-year-old hairdresser who worked at an İstanbul salon.
“He came in a bit late on that Saturday saying he couldn’t see properly,” said Belgin, joint owner of the salon where he worked in the Ortaköy district, who didn’t want to give her surname.
Not long after he got there, Erduan needed to sit down because he couldn’t even hold a pair of scissors, she told Agence France-Presse.
“He told us all he could see was whiteness, so I immediately drove him to a private hospital,” she said.
There, he saw an ophthalmologist who quickly realized it was a case of bootleg alcohol poisoning.
Erduan collapsed in late January, barely a week after the city was shaken by news that within just four days, 33 people had died and 29 were critically ill after drinking bootleg alcohol.
That number has since shot up to 70, with another 63 dead in the capital of Ankara, Turkish media reports say. Another 36 remain in intensive care.
Erduan told the doctors he bought the vodka at a corner shop in Ortaköy, saying it was five times cheaper than the supermarket because it was imported from Bulgaria.
They gave him folic acid to try and stave off the effects of methanol, a toxic substance often found in bootleg alcohol that can cause blindness, liver damage and death.
“He was still perfectly conscious,” his boss told AFP, her eyes red from crying.
Shortly afterwards, he was rushed into intensive care and intubated.
“On the fourth day, we went with his son to see him. He was totally yellow,” she said, describing jaundice, another symptom of methanol poisoning.
“That evening, we heard he had died.”
‘Six hours to feel effects’
“Nobody should have to die like that. The alcohol seemed totally legal from the packaging and the branding when in fact it came from an illegal distillery,” said Erol Işık, her partner at the salon, who was clearly angry.
“Taşkın didn’t drink to get drunk, he wasn’t an alcoholic,” he said.
Speaking to AFP at his laboratory at İstanbul’s Yeditepe University where he heads the toxicology department, professor Ahmet Aydın explained how lethal it can be.
“Just one glass of fake vodka made from methylated alcohol can be deadly,” he said.
The difference between ethanol, which is used for making spirits, and methanol, which is used in varnishes and antifreeze, is only visible in a laboratory, he explained, showing test tubes containing the two alcohols.
“No-one can tell them apart by taste, sight or smell,” he said.
“The biggest danger with methanol poisoning is that you don’t feel the effects straight away. It only manifests after about six hours. If the person goes straight to a hospital, they have a chance of recovering.”
But it can very quickly become “too late.”
“People really need to be careful,” he warned, saying it was a lot easier to buy methanol than ethanol, the purchase of which is highly regulated.
“But who would drink alcohol without a proper label?” he wondered, following reports several people died after buying alcohol in half-liter water bottles from a business posing as a Turkmen restaurant in İstanbul.
‘Alcohol is too expensive’
Like the main opposition Republican People’s Party, Özgür Aybaş, head of the Tekel association of alcohol retailers, blames the crippling taxes imposed by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who regularly rails against drinking and smoking.
“Nowhere else in the world are there such high taxes on alcohol,” he told AFP, saying people had no choice but to seek out alternatives.
Buying a liter bottle of rakı, Turkey’s aniseed-flavored national liquor, from a supermarket currently costs around $35 in a country where the minimum wage is $600.
Standing in front of the now-closed shop where Taşkın Erduan bought the vodka that killed him, a neighbor called Levent, who didn’t give his surname, also blamed taxes.
“Alcohol is too expensive in Turkey. It costs about 100 Turkish lira to make a bottle of rakı but with the tax, that becomes 1,200 lira,” or the equivalent of 12 hours of work at minimum wage, he said.
Levent said he had long known the owner of the shop, describing him as “a nice guy.”
But with Turkey in the grip of a severe economic crisis, he said he’d long since stopped being surprised at how far people would go to bring in a bit more cash.
“People will do anything for money. They have no shame anymore.”
© Agence France-Presse