POISON.
To the Editor. SA, —After reading in this evening’s Stab I the statement of Dr Youl } the Coroner, of Melbourne, as to the injurious character of colonial beer, and the declarations made by all the brewers that their beer is pure and unadulterated, and the statement made by Mr Sydney Gibbons that for fifteen years he had never met with an adulterated sample of colonial beer, I said to myself that the conclusion is inevitable: colonial beer pure and unadulterated must poison. If what is said about beer by those who profess to know be true, not only does colonial beer poison, but English beer and every other beer does the same, and it is not necessary that deleterious adulterations should be proved to account for their poisonous properties. Nor is the reason far to seek. All fermented liquors contain alcohol, and speaking generally, beer is good or bad in proportion as it contains more or less alcohol. Small beer contains 1.25 per cent, while Burton’s ale has 9 per cmt of alcohol, and this is the actual principle which gives character to these liquors, and on account of their possession of which people drink them. Now, what is alcohol? A writer in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ some time ago said: “In materia medica, the standard writers class alcohol and opium together as narcotic poisons.” Here is] an instance: Gfaristiaon on poison says“ Professor Orfila found that alcohol is a violent poison when injected into the cellular tissue, and that it produces through that channel the same effects as when taken into the stomach.” What then are the consequences to the public of the extensive use of liquors containing alcohol ? I have before me the report •f a speech by Dr Kavanagh, of Deptford, delivered by him at a public meeting at Woolwich, in which he says; “ I tell you that there are more people destroyed annually in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by the indiscriminate use, or rather abuse of alcoholic liquors than by all the contagious disorders put together, and every intelligent medical man will tell you the same thing. . . All our great authorities on toxicology, or on the nature and properties of poison, rank alcohol among'the number. . . . I may be told that this is the result of intemperance or excess—that the moderate use of alcohol, in the shape of beer,' &c., is not only harmless but beneficial. Science, on the contrary, teacher that the injury is one of degree only, and that any, even the least quantity is injurious in exact proportion to the quantity used, and that it is never harmless, but always injurious to the healthy subject; and, independently of science, all experience proves the aame thing.” This being so, it is obvious how pure and unadulterated beer poisons, and that Dr Youl’s statement may be, and probably is correct notwithstanding the absence of deleterious adulterations in the beer spoken of.—l am Ac., ’ _ ji „ , Observes. Dunedin, March 18.
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Evening Star, Issue 3766, 19 March 1875, Page 3
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495POISON. Evening Star, Issue 3766, 19 March 1875, Page 3
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