The news of police personnel in Tuli busting an illicit liquor adulteration and bottling unit on Thursday has once again opened the debate on why or if the Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act 1989 has failed. However, apart from the debate on the NLTP Act, the Tuli incident has revealed that manufacturing spurious liquor, rum to be more specific, is an easy process that can be done with the possession of some crude materials. As per police sources, two containers of methanol spirit were recovered from the site, a piggery farm, along with other crude items used for manufacturing the spurious liquor.
Interestingly, the real rum is made of ethanol (not methanol). This means that the spurious liquor that is available in Mokokchung is not liquor that contains ethanol but poison that contains methanol. In essence, folks here are consuming poison, not liquor. So, technically, they are not alcoholics but poison-holics. This can be surmised from the fact that the liquor adulteration busted in Tuli is not the only one on the planet! Across the border, in places like Haloating is Sibsagar or Khatkhati in Karbi Anglong, there must be a number of such ‘manufacturing’ units who have been supplying the spurious liquor all along over the years. There have been reports of such illicit liquor adulteration units being busted in the past. Given the fact that the one busted at a piggery farm in Tuli was a recently established unit, it is plausible to believe that there must be other such units operating within our borders.
A cursory survey on the availability of rum in Mokokchung reveals that the brand ‘MC Rum’ makes up for almost 99% of rum sold here, mostly sold in PET plastic bottles. The fact that the rum is sold in plastic bottles is proof enough that it is spurious and adulterated. Therefore, regardless of whether the rum is manufactured within our borders or not, it is spurious and extremely harmful for human consumption. The (criminal) ingenuity of manufacturing spurious rum, flavouring it with additives, is just brilliant! People would go any distance to make some easy bucks. If only such ingenuity were put to more constructive use, one imagines, the world would have been a better place.
Coming back to the confiscation of various items used for manufacturing of spurious liquor by police in Tuli, it has once again reminded us of the fact that there will always be supply as long as there is demand. And because liquor is prohibited, the suppliers will find a way to meet the demand in whatever ways possible. Illicit rum can be manufactured in a very simple process, so why risk arrests by smuggling spurious rum when it can be easily manufactured in our backyards. How people employ their ingenuity is sometimes satirical, other times criminal.