Calgary woman who went blind due to methanol poisoning starts petition for education
· Toronto Sun
Calgary actress Ashley King is trying to prevent the horrible situation that led her to going blind from happening to someone else.
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King, 33, was a 19-year-old backpacker back in 2011 when she was poisoned by a methanol-tainted cocktail at a nightclub (now closed) in Kuta, Bali.
Now King has gathered more than 27,000 signatures on a change.org petition since last summer to raise awareness about the potential dangers of drinking abroad.
“I remember (drinking) like a fruity cocktail mixed beverage and they were serving them in reusable water bottles so you wouldn’t spill your drink while you were dancing,” said King, currently rehearsing a new play, Lazy Susan , premiering next week at Calgary’s disability theatre company, Inside Out. “It had a lid. (I) didn’t really think anything of it.”
That was a Tuesday night.
By Thursday afternoon, after she’d flown to Christchurch in New Zealand via Sydney, Australia on Wednesday, she said she started to feel “really out of it.”
King’s luggage had been lost, so she checked into a hostel in Christchurch and went straight to bed. Upon waking, she said she noticed the light was very dim, even though it was noon.
“All of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe and I was gasping for air,” King said. “I thought maybe I was having an asthma attack or something because I’ve had an inhaler my entire life.”
She made her way down to reception and staff took her to a walk-in clinic, but her eyesight was getting worse, so they took her to the hospital, where she went completely blind (she has 2% of her eyesight left now).
Her blood results eventually showed a large amount of methanol in her system.
King said the only treatment was alcohol, which leads to the body no longer breaking down the methanol. Instead, it breaks down the alcohol.
“So they basically had to get me very, very, very intoxicated in the hospital,” she said. “But the drunker I got, the more I could breathe and the more I could see.”
The doctor told King her mother was flying to Christchurch as they wheeled her into ICU where they were going to exchange her blood for new blood.
King lucky to alive
The next day she could see a little bit but it was what she called “very static,” and the doctors told her she was lucky to be alive and her optic nerves were likely dying.
After a week, she was an outpatient who came to the hospital for tests daily, and after a month she finally flew home to Calgary.
“They were treating me like somebody who needed to see a specialist,” said King once back home. “So when I found my vision was really getting worse, I went into emergency, like someone needs to see me.”
Eventually, they said there was nothing they could do and gave her anti-depressants.
“The best thing they can do is early intervention and try and get the methanol out of your system as soon as they can, in order to restore your eye sight,” King said. “But once the damage has already happened it’s pretty irreversible.”
60 Minutes Australia produced a 2025 report on methanol poisoning of multiple backpackers in Laos, but when King was poisoned she struggled to find more information about others with the same fate.
Feds warning about Bali
That Laos report led to the Canadian government including a warning to travellers against methanol poisoning in Bali. (Something that King said didn’t exist when she travelled. She said she had looked at the site before she went.)
“Social media is so much more prevalent (about the topic) now,” said King, who premiered her self-penned play about her experience, Static: A Party Girl’s Memoir , last year (based on her limited podcast of the same name). “Now I’ve found so many people over the years who have been poisoned.”
According to the World Health Organization, methanol poisoning is a significant issue, especially in countries lacking stringent regulations or where counterfeit alcohol circulates freely.
In her petition, King is calling on the Canadian transport and education ministers to implement airport safety reforms, airline safety announcement warnings and school curriculum changes that would educate about the risks of methanol poisoning in high-risk destinations.
She said she realizes these are big asks and so far has only had one meeting with WestJet’s head office in Calgary last year “and they seem very interested. I haven’t heard anything from (Air Canada, or the transport and education ministers) but my hope is that with change.org, they seem to have a lot of faith in my campaign, that it can make a difference.”
An inquiry to WestJet by the Sun wasn’t immediately answered.