Home-brewed ’superjuice’ plagues dry communities in Manitoba’s north
WINNIPEG — A potent new homebrew that is fuelling violence, suicide and crime is plaguing dry northern reserves in Manitoba.
Chiefs, RCMP and politicians are struggling to deal with a toxic drink known as “superjuice” made with quick-fermenting yeast.
Chief David Harper of the remote Garden Hill First Nation says a one-litre bottle costing $40 is enough for four people to drink until they black out. Abuse of the powerful concoction worsens on days when welfare and child benefit cheques arrive, he says…
Police talk of people wailing in pain after drinking the brew as it continues to ferment inside the body. After a night of consuming superjuice, people wake up in jail cells with no memory of how they got there, Harper says.
The brewer’s yeast is sold in packets, often at wine-making stores or over the Internet, and then mixed with sugar and water in a pail. The mixture can be sold within 24 hours but the longer it ferments, the more potent it is…
Although some aboriginal youth have suggested banning the sale of brewer’s yeast to native people, Robinson says that would be a violation of their rights. So would confiscating the yeast at provincial airports in the north, he suggests…
Aboriginal leaders in Manitoba call for ban on sale of yeast
The unusual, race-based prohibition would force retailers throughout Manitoba to ask for identification and refuse First Nations customers trying to buy brewer’s yeast, the main ingredient in so-called “super juice.”
“Get the status cards being checked. The ones that are First Nations status cards, they won’t be allowed to serve them,” said Harper, 31, who represents Wasagamack First Nation on the four-member council.
The council blames super juice for increasing levels of violence and death in their communities, roughly 600 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
“We’ve had so many super juice-related deaths, I lost count,” said council member Bobby Monias of Garden Hill. “Super juice suicides, super juice gang violence, beatings. So many other things and super juice was almost always a factor in everything that happened.”
But a race-based ban on the purchase of a legal product simply won’t fly, said one human rights expert…
Hmmm, trying to do the math. He is saying that 1/4 of a liter is enough to knock someone out. If that was 100% alcohol, that would be about the equivalent of 1/2 liter of 100 proof whiskey. But, I dont think you can get there w/o distillation. As far as I know, all higher alcohol spirits are distilled to get that high alcohol content. Most yeasts die at high alcohol percentages, with brewers yeast being more tolerant. Assuming that it is possible to reach even 50%, which I doubt, you would have the equivalent of 1/4 liter of hootch. That would be the same as a little over a cup of liquor. If I drink that much quickly, I guess I would konk out. However, for most alcoholics, that would just be a good start. If there is a super juice, methinks it has been doctored.
Steve
Yes, the proportions definitely support further analysis unto punch-packing propensity.
BTW, all three of your comments on my serial posts from today landed in the Spam filter, which we can access, when signed in, from the Comments link on the Dashboard. I approved and thus released them to daylight, as does, I gather, our overlord H.M. Stuart periodically, a method which when effected inserts the comments within the original sequence of their timestamps upon submission. Your comment regarding reading Hayek and Rothbard, to my Austrian-econ post, also arrived late, though not from my Spam-spelunking. This trapping seems to happen more often on comments where your AOL email address is visible on the Dashboard to fellow Alexandrians, than on those where it is not. I’d say, offhand, when your comment does not post immediately, you might consider going into the basement thus, poking around among the cobwebbed come-ons for foreign-exchange trading, and pick your jaw off the floor when among the crass hawkers, sits steve2 whistling quietly with thoughts of rewards no more rapacious than those attending his proper and public audition before those sibling bloggers hoping to read him as faithfully as he, almost alone, compliments our divers posts in commenting indefatigably upon them in the first place. So on behalf of steve2, and the Alexandria Seventeen as a whole (Nineteen, if you disaggregate Red/Cyn/Jane, aka The Wired Sisters, as three), I brandish the rolled metro-daily fishwrap in scolding,
Bad Spam filter – BAD!