Contaminated alcohol available for sale in licensed bottle shops

All beverage alcohol sold in Australia is subject to taxation, which allows the government to set controls on the price the alcohol is sold for, and produces records of sales that are used to calculate consumption rates of alcohol. Unrecorded alcohol is alcohol that is not taxed, and therefore not included in alcohol consumption statistics; it can include alcohol brought into the country from overseas, home brews of beer, or illicit alcohol. Illicit alcohol is alcohol that contravenes taxation, liquor licensing or food and safety regulations. This can include alcohol that was smuggled in from overseas or alcohol that was manufactured locally. While most of the illicit alcohol market is believed to be as safe for human consumption as licit alcohol products, the presence of an illicit alcohol market increases the risk of contaminated alcohol products mixing into circulation. There are two major routes for the introduction of contaminated alcohol products into the market: 

1. poor quality control distillation; and 
2. diversion of industrial alcohol that is not intended for human consumption into the beverage alcohol market. 

During the process of alcohol distillation three segments are produced: the ‘heads’, ‘hearts’ and ‘tails’. When the distillation is controlled, and the manufacturers are responsible, the ‘heads’ which contain lighter alcohols like methanol, and the ‘tails’ which contain heavier oils, are discarded, and only the ‘hearts’ which contains the ethanol are collected for distribution. When the manufacturers cut corners and practice poor quality control, they do not bother to discard the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ and instead bottle all of the output. 

Industrial alcohol is high-strength alcohol that is intended for non-drinking purposes, such as manufacturing, cleaning products, fuel and solvents. It is exempt from the taxation that is applied to beverage alcohol. It is distilled to a much higher alcohol by volume level than drinking alcohol, and manufacturers add bitter and toxic chemicals (denaturants) to the industrial alcohol to make sure that it is unpalatable. When industrial alcohol is diverted into the beverage alcohol market, distributors purchase industrial alcohol, (hopefully) put it through a filtration process to filter out the denaturants, add flavourings to cover the remaining denaturants, and bottle the output. Both routes introduce contaminants into the beverage alcohol market, which represent health hazards beyond the known harms of ethanol. 

Finding contaminated alcohol in bottle shops

In our preliminary study on the availability of illicit alcohol in Australia, our team visited four licensed bottle shops in affluent areas of Melbourne in 2025 and identified and purchased three bottles of suspected illicit alcohol. We also purchased a control product, a bottle of vodka, to serve as a baseline reference. 

We sent all four bottles to ChemCentre in Western Australia for chemical analysis including identification of the alcohols present and other contaminants. The control bottle and one of the illicit alcohol products contained ethanol and a range of flavouring components. The other two illicit alcohol products both contained methanol and a range of plasticizers, all known to pose long-term health harms to consumers beyond the hazards posed by ethanol. 

Our findings indicate that both bottles, sourced in different shops and marketed as separate brands, were produced by distillers who did not practice common quality control that involves separating the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ of the distillation from the ‘hearts’. The levels of plasticizers and the types involved, which are typically used in plastic tubing, industrial hoses and plastic containers, indicate that the plasticizers most likely leached through the hoses or plastic tubs into the alcohol product. DEHP, found in Product A, is a highly regulated endocrine disruptor linked to reproductive, kidney and liver issues. The methanol levels that we identified, particularly in Product B that far exceeded the levels of methanol allowable in vodka products in Australia, are unlikely to be fatal or cause ophthalmologic harm given the amount of ethanol also present in Product B. However, long-term exposure to even lower levels of methanol can lead to neurological symptoms such as dizziness, chronic headaches, and visual impairment. 

While this is a small preliminary study that concentrated on a handful of bottle shops and products that they sold, it demonstrated that there is an illicit alcohol market that has infiltrated the licit retail alcohol market in Australia, and that this is illicit alcohol market is exposing Australians to contaminated alcohol. In subsequent systematic research (forthcoming) we have confirmed the presence of illicit alcohol products in the retail alcohol market across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, suggesting that this problem is not limited to Melbourne alone. 

Practice and regulatory implications

In 2023-2024, there were 84,318 hospitalisations in Australia linked to alcohol consumption. As Australia has a licit alcohol market, and up until now, low awareness of the risks of contaminated alcohol being in circulation, Australian health services, including hospitals, are not accustomed to considering possible exposure to methanol, or other contaminants such as tert-butyl (a common denaturant that is linked to gastrointestinal distress), when dealing with alcohol presentations. Given the risks involved, there may be a need to develop protocols to rule out the ingestion of methanol or other contaminants within emergency medicine, particularly in the cases of suspicious alcohol presentations, such as those that are linked to ‘drink spiking’.  

From a regulatory perspective, there are a few policy options that could reduce the harms of the contaminated illicit alcohol market in Australia, these include: 

• random chemical testing of alcohol products available for sale (such as those in place in the European Union for all food and beverage products), 
• interagency coordination between the government agencies that regulate alcohol (similar to the coordination efforts to combat illicit tobacco in Australia); and

•  ‘know your supplier’ regulations (that would require licensees to ensure that their suppliers are licensed and above board).

   

Dr Michala Kowalski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Her program of work draws on multi-methods studies of drug and alcohol policy and policymaking. 

Dr Nicholas Taylor is a Research Fellow at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University. His work involves the use of epidemiological data and field research methods to monitor alcohol consumption trends across Australia and to track trends in alcohol-related harm.