From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Here's your host, Scott Bertram.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome in to another

edition of The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this episode, we talk with Dr. Courtney Mayett from

Hillsdale's chemistry department about methadol poisoning at various vacation spots. Casey S. Pipes

joins us to talk about his new book after the fall, the remarkable comeback of Richard Nixon.

John J. Miller, director of Hillsdale's Journalism Department, will describe journalism around the time of our founding.

And Paul Ray from Hillsdale's History Department will discuss his latest book, Sparta's First Attic War.

First, we're joined now by Dr. Courtney Mayett, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Hillsale College.

Dr. Mayatt, how are you? I'm great. How are you?

Very well. Thanks for joining us once again. If people have been eyeing the headlines of it here

over the summer, they perhaps have seen some stories out of Costa Rica, Dominican Republic,

tourists literally dying. Problem problems in these areas. Costa Rica, in fact, has issued a travel alert for potentially tainted alcohol there.

What's happening here? Yeah, so this is a scary story. You know, we all think about making travel plans in the summer and going to these exotic locations. And, of course, you know, drinking the occasional cocktail is part of these travel plans. And so, yeah, recently there have been 20 deaths reported in Costa Rica since June, and they estimate that approximately 41 people have been affected by alcohol poisoning.

And this is not ethanol poisoning, but it is methanol poisoning.

So a different molecule, it can be naturally occurring or it can be intentionally placed into, um, into, uh,

ethanol. Um, and so the deaths have resulted from the methanol that is in the drinks. Um,

some stories have been reporting that they are, uh,feit brands, that perhaps in order to increase the volume of these beverages, methanol has been added to existing bottles.

So it's actually, you know, I actually haven't, you know, gone too deeply into the

detective part of the story, but the problem in the scare is there that methanol does exist

in these alcohols. With methadol, how does it make its way into alcohol in these cases? Is it possible

that it's an accident? It's an

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