You are correct. If I gave the impression that it is a safe endeavour, I am sorry. It is safe IF done correctly, but it can get explodey if you fuck up bad enough.

Do your research, keep it small scale and don’t sell.

I you make your own, there is no risk for blindness. Blindness comes from methanol, not ethanol. If you use a yeast based process to produce the alcohol and then distill it, there is no way to accidentally produce methanol in that process. The cases where people get blind or die from moonshine stems from when the feds replaced moonshine with methanol to be able to make that claim and disrupt the business of organized crime during the prohibition. There are still cases now and then where people try to make drinkable alcohol from some industrial base and don’t know how to.

TLDR: Don’t buy, make.

So that’s were the inspiration for Ford Prefect came from.

Eh, close enough.

Math checks out.

Yeah, I haven’t read the study of course. Only read about it. Which makes the claim above even more dubious. But hey, this is the future, who has the time to fact check anymore?

The funny thing is that the “extra strength” placebos likely have a better chance of working. The more elaborate and involved the placebo is, the greater the chance of it actually working even if you know it is a placebo. Our minds are weird. As always, I’m too lazy to look up the actual study so I don’t know if it was a quality study or not.