On the night of Chinese New Year's Eve 1998, every family was sitting at home watching the Spring Festival Gala, but something unusual happened in Shuozhou, Shanxi, and a very eye-catching prompt appeared under the TV screen: Recently, there has been an influx of fake wine in our city, and many people have been poisoned, please do not drink bulk liquor produced by Qingxu, Wenshui and Xiaoyi.
Seeing such news, Lao Zhang was taken aback, he also bought 10 pounds of bulk liquor from Qingxu yesterday, ready to be used for guests in the New Year. Shanxi's Fenjiu is very famous in the country, once ranked first in China's liquor industry for several years in a row, and the annual profits and taxes paid are 6 times that of Moutai and 4 times that of Wuliangye, which is a veritable boss in wine.
Shanxi people like to drink, but very casual, there is no requirement to drink high-end alcohol, once said that Shanxi people have never been drunk, what is going on?
Shanxi people never advise wine at the wine table, drink as much as they can, just have fun, and do not force it. If you really can't replace it with drinks, that's okay. As soon as some Shanxi people arrived at the wine table, they began to say how much they could drink, wanting to overwhelm each other in momentum, and when it was time to really fight wine, they found various reasons to shirk.
Shanxi people drink wine to care about taste and cost performance, like to drink inexpensive wine with good taste, which is why so many people like to buy bulk wine in 1998.
During the Spring Festival, hospitals across Shuozhou admitted many patients, all of whom showed nausea, vomiting, and difficulty breathing, and doctors found the cause of their vomit, all of whom were methanol poisoning.
The liquor we often drink, the main component is ethanol, methanol is also called industrial alcohol is toxic, can not drink. Why is methanol toxic?
The toxic effect of methanol on the human body is caused by methanol and its metabolites formaldehyde and formic acid, which are mainly characterized by damage to the central nervous system, ocular damage and metabolic acidosis. It can be absorbed through the respiratory tract, digestive tract, and skin. Acute formaldehyde poisoning in the acute stage, if the amount is large, is enough to cause the death of the patient.
The mass alcohol poisoning incident in Shuozhou has attracted the attention of high-level officials and demanded strict and thorough investigation. The Shanxi Provincial Public Security Department organized cadres and police to conduct a carpet investigation and found many clues to the problem, all of which pointed to bulk liquor. These bulk liquors have been tested, and there is also a large amount of methanol in them, that is, someone blends methanol in the liquor and sells it to the market.
After further investigation, Wang Qinghua, a farmer in Wenshui County, became an important suspect, Wang Qinghua had no culture, perhaps thinking crazy about money, so he came up with the idea of replacing liquor with low-priced methanol and selling it at the price of liquor to obtain high profits.
According to Wang Qinghua, he purchased 34 tons of methanol, diluted it with water, and made it into bulk liquor, which weighed 57.5 tons.
After the production was completed, Wang Qinghua sold the fake wine to self-employed Wang Xiaodong, Yang Wancai, Liu Shichun and others. The illegal sales amount of Wang Qinghua and Wu Yanping reached 138,000 yuan.
From December 1997 to January 1998, Wang Xiaodong purchased 22 tons of counterfeit wine from Wang Qinghua on five occasions, blended all of them into the liquor produced by himself, and then sold 17.4 tons to Yang Wancai. Sold 34.76 tons to Wang Zhencai, Liu Zhenxian, Liu Xiaochun and others in Lingqiu County, these blended liquor were circulated several times, resulting in methanol poisoning by 183 people who drank this liquor in Shuocheng District, Pinglu District and Lingqiu County, of which 26 died and 1 person was blind in his eye.
In fact, Wang Qinghua has also made fake wine before, but it has not been recognized, and there is a fluke mentality. In fact, as early as November 1996, Wang Qinghua began to process, sell and produce bulk liquor without a license, and he was sentenced to prison because the production quantity was not large, the scope was very small, the sentence was very light, and after he was released after completing his sentence, he did not repent and returned to his old business.
On 4 July 1998, the Supreme People's Court approved the death sentences of six people, including Wang Qinghua, Wu Baoquan, Wang Xiaodong and Wang Rui.
Since then, the brand of Shanxi Fenjiu began to decline, and the people had doubts about the quality of Shanxi's liquor, and did not dare to buy and drink Shanxi liquor, and Fenjiu gradually had to be caught up by later Maotai and Wuliangye.
In 2008, there was also a food poisoning incident, that is, the "melamine" incident. Many infants and young children suffered from kidney stones because they drank Sanlu milk powder, and then investigators found that these milk powders contained melamine, a chemical raw material. Not only Sanlu, but even large dairy companies such as Yili and Mengniu also found the existence of melamine, at that time many people no longer trusted domestic milk powder and bought imported milk powder.
Three years later, a 2011 CCTV Weekly Quality Report survey found that 70% of Chinese people were still afraid to buy domestic milk powder.
Food safety is no small matter, and whoever uses his brain on food safety issues will be severely punished by the law.