In December 2016, over 70 people died of methanol poisoning in the Russian city of Irkutsk. Precipitated by the consumption of fraudulent surrogate alcohol, it was the deadliest such incident in Russia's post-Soviet history.

Russian consumption of surrogate alcohol rose rapidly in the early 2010s amid worsening economic conditions. Surrogates cost less than government-regulated vodka and were commonly available from supermarkets, small shops, and vending machines.

In the Irkutsk incident, people drank hawthorn-scented bath oil with the brand name boyaryshnik. While the product was typically made with and labeled as containing drinkable ethanol, at least one batch was made instead with methanol. When even a small amount is consumed, methanol acts as a nerve toxin. If untreated, it severely damages the optic nerve, causes paralysis, and eventually leads to unconsciousness.

A government investigation found that the methanol was sourced from an employee of a local windshield washer fluid production facility. In response to the poisoning, in mid-2017 the Russian government increased the legal punishments for illegally producing and selling alcohol and made it more difficult to acquire surrogate alcohols by banning vending machines that sold them.

In the 2010s, Russia's economy suffered from a financial crisis, depressed oil prices, and international sanctions put into place during the Ukrainian crisis even while prices for food were increasing. In Irkutsk Oblast, salaries were often low. Paychecks totaling around 15,000 rubles (about US$246 in 2016) were common, and by early 2017 the number of people living below the poverty line of 10,000 rubles per month (about $170 at the time) had increased by three percent since the beginning of the crisis.

At the same time, Russia remained one of the highest consumers of alcohol per capita in the world. According to the World Health Organization, Russian citizens consumed an average of 11.7 liters (3.1 U.S. gal) per person every year (as of 2016). To continue those drinking habits amidst the declining economic situation, many Russians turned to less-regulated surrogate alcohols as their cost was half that of the cheapest vodka, whose price was regulated by the government.

Experts estimated that surrogate alcohols made up twenty percent of the total alcohol consumed in Russia. Other experts estimated that more than ten million Russians routinely purchased such alcohol, and that its consumption had increased by as much as 65 percent since the introduction of an alcohol excise tax in 2009. Such a widespread use of surrogate alcohols led to increasing amounts of alcohol poisonings, a problem that was already severe in Russia as of the early 21st century.

The mass methanol poisoning in Irkutsk, a city of about 600,000 people near Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, was caused by a fraudulent batch of hawthorn-scented bath oil. It was named boyaryshnik or Боярышник, the Russian word for hawthorn, and was also described as a lotion. The product shared its name with a popular hawthorn-flavored tincture, and vodka historian Alexander Nikishin told the magazine Vice that was a deliberate choice to obfuscate its intended purpose:

You can buy boyaryshnik in a pharmacy, a medicinal tincture. And then there is the boyaryshnik spirit, which they call medicinal, but really it's just alcohol with the taste of boyaryshnik. It's bootlegging, pure and simple.

The boyaryshnik bottles carried clear warnings that they were not intended for consumption. However, many Russians knew that the product was meant to be a cheap vodka substitute and government authorities condoned its sale. The oil bottles were typically half the size of vodka, but the alcohol content was so high that individuals could dilute them to a similar alcohol by volume.

These sorts of surrogate alcohols were widely available in Russian supermarkets, shops, and vending machines. They were also not subject to any legal age requirement, alcohol excise stamps, or other restrictions introduced in the early 2010s to curb alcohol consumption in the country. The vending machines were particularly problematic: they were often deliberately placed near impoverished areas of Russian cities to appeal to those seeking a cheap alternative to legal alcohol at any hour of the day or night. They were also highly profitable.

Methanol is a poisonous substance. It is difficult to tell apart from ethanol, the substance found in vodka and other alcoholic drinks. Both are colorless and give off a similar odor, but methanol is cheaper.

Methanol can enter the body when drunk, when placed on the skin, or when breathed in. Amounts as small as 10 milliliters (0.34 U.S. fl oz) can be fatal, although people have survived amounts as high as 400 milliliters (14 U.S. fl oz). Symptoms occur as soon as a half hour after ingestion, and include nausea and vomiting (gastric distress) along with confusion and drowsiness (central nervous system depression). People can also fall into a coma and enter respiratory arrest. As long as 72 hours after exposure, people's vision can be negatively affected; humans break down methanol into formate metabolites, which destroys cells in the optic nerve and can leave people blind.

Common methanol antidotes include fomepizole and ethanol, but fomepizole was not approved for use in Russia, and ethanol is difficult to administer.

The bath oil involved in the December 2016 mass poisoning was made with methanol instead of the usual ethanol. It was placed into bottles that had the bath oil's typical ethanol-bearing labels. The methanol was acquired from an employee of a local windshield washer fluid firm, who stole and sold the substance without the knowledge of the company's head.

Methanol-poisoned individuals began arriving at hospitals on 17 December, and local press reports emerged late on 18 December with the news that eight people had died and another nine were hospitalized. By the end of the next day, a total of 57 people had been hospitalized and 49 were dead. Because a number of residents had been overcome by poisoning symptoms before being able to call for help, Irkutsk authorities resorted to looking for deceased individuals on their properties and near common gathering points for homeless individuals. The authorities delivered the bodies straight to a morgue.

Hospitalizations and deaths continued after the initial surge. On the 20th, the Irkutsk health ministry reported that casualties had risen to 52 with another 29 hospitalized. Those numbers rose to 62 dead plus 40 hospitalized on the 21st; 74 plus 30 on the 23rd; 77 plus 16 on the 27th, and finally 78 dead on 9 January. Some individuals survived because they had been drinking other ethanol-based alcohol at the same time as the methanol-laced product, and the former helped counteract the latter.

The total number of deaths has been reported as 74, 76, and 78. An Irkutsk medical investigation gives the lowest figure, as four deaths previously attributed to methanol were actually caused by drinking too much non-fraudulent ethanol-based bath oil. Other scientific and media articles have supported death tolls of 76 or 78 people. A total of 123 people were hospitalized, a number of whom died. The incident was the deadliest mass methanol poisoning in Russia's post-Soviet history. "Poisonings caused by cheap surrogate alcohol are a regular occurrence", a reporter for the Associated Press news agency wrote, "but the Irkutsk case was unprecedented in its scale."

External images
Poisoning survivors in intensive care (via TASS)
The hospital where poisoned individuals were taken (via TASS)
Additional images of the hospital (via RIA Novosti)

Most of those affected were residents of the Novo-Lenino [ru] neighborhood in Irkutsk. They included teachers, nurses, and drivers; The New York Times described the majority as holding "steady if low-paying jobs". The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda profiled a 34-year-old mother who bought the bath oil to share over dinner with her husband. She consumed two shots worth of the drink, and that was enough to kill her. According to state-owned media, Irkutsk's government gave 13,325 rubles to individual families of the dead to pay for funerals (about US$200 in 2016).

Irkutsk's mayor Dmitry Berdnikov declared a state of emergency on 19 December. By the next day, the Russian government said that it had seized about 2,000 liters (530 U.S. gal) of illegal alcohol, uncovered a bath oil production facility, and removed 500 liters (130 U.S. gal) of remaining bath oil from the shelves of around 100 retailers in the Irkutsk area. On the 23rd, the state-owned TASS news agency reported that Russian police had seized over 10,000 small bath oil bottles.

In the days after the poisoning, Russian authorities opened a criminal case and detained 23 people. They included local vendors who sold the product, police officers, and a senior regional government official for the greater Siberian region. A further five people were arrested in January 2017 and charged with selling and publicizing surrogate alcohol. In February 2020, the last of 19 individuals jailed or fined for distributing the fraudulent alcohol was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.

After the incident, a spokesperson for Russian president Vladimir Putin called it a "terrible tragedy". They blamed it on a failing of "supervisory bodies". Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for a ban on non-traditional alcoholic liquids like bath oils, saying "it's an outrage, and we need to put an end to this". Chairman of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko publicly supported additional regulations on alcohol-containing liquids, and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin proposed accomplishing something similar by requiring pharmaceutical prescriptions. Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician, alleged that "boyaryshnik is killing more people than terrorist acts did in the whole history of Russia" each year.

Putin announced on 22 December that he supported increasing regulations on products with more than 25 percent alcohol, increasing punishments for anyone who broke alcohol manufacturing and distribution laws, and expanding the alcohol excise tax to alcohol-containing products in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics business sectors. "In practice we see what such indulgences lead to: dozens of people dying like flies," Putin said.

On 26 December 2016, Rospotrebnadzor, Russia's government agency devoted to consumer protection, banned all sales of most non-food items with more than 25 percent alcohol (with exceptions for window cleaning liquids and perfume). Their order was scheduled to run for one month, but they extended it multiple times so that it was in effect nearly every day through 2018. Nevertheless, Russian companies used the exceptions and exclusions in the measure to continue selling drinkable medicinal tinctures, antiseptics, and Eau de Cologne, even while they removed bath oils, some kinds of perfume, and other similar products.

In May 2017, the Russian government pegged the minimum legal price of vodka to 205 rubles per half liter (equivalent to about one pint, and US$3.06 in 2016). That was lower than a previously announced price increase to 219, but it was still about 2.4 times the minimum price of vodka in 2011 and 15 rubles more than the price of vodka at the time of the Irkutsk poisoning. Two months later, they strengthened legal punishments for illegally producing and selling alcohol, banned the kind of alcoholic vending machines through which the Irkutsk bath oil was sold, and prohibited online advertisements of alcoholic retailers.

In December 2018, the government passed a new law that ended the ability of retailers to sell non-food items with an ethanol content of 28% or above at a price below that of the legal minimum for vodka and other liquors. The intended effect was to put an end to the ability of cheap surrogate alcohol to economically compete with their regulated alternatives.

• List of methanol poisoning incidents

• Lachenmeier, Dirk W.; Neufeld, Maria; Rehm, Jürgen (15 February 2021). "The Impact of Unrecorded Alcohol Use on Health: What Do We Know in 2020?". Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. 82 (1): 28–41. doi:10.15288/jsad.2021.82.28. PMID 33573720. S2CID 231901412.