[Natsu]

Alcohol is still denatured, you know. I think they just made it taste bad instead of making it poisonous. The intent was not for people to drink it but for people to avoid diversion (using industrial alcohol as drinking alcohol).

[mnw21cam]

No, it's still poisonous, because it contains the head of distillation, which contains methanol which would be discarded in alcohol made for human consumption. Yes, they add other denaturants to make it taste foul as well. However there are still a few cases of serious alcoholics who try to drink methylated spirit.

Amusingly, the treatment for methanol poisoning is to get the patient drunk with the good stuff, although this is usually done under medically-induced coma with a purified ethanol drip. The ethanol competes with the methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme, reducing the rate at which methanol is broken down in the body into really poisonous formic acid. There was a case in 2007 where a hospital ran out of medical ethanol, and substituted vodka in a drip while treating poisoning with ethylene glycol, which has the same treatment. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm

[tekromancr]

There was a really cool speaker at HopeX that talked about it. I can't find the link to the video right now.