Smoking Alcohol?
http://youtu.be/rCMajLBbgkM
An individual can pour alcohol over dry ice and inhale it directly or with a straw, or make a DIY vaporizing kit using bike pumps. The alcohol of choice is poured into a bottle, the bottle is corked, and the bicycle pump needle is poked through the top of the cork. Air is pumped into the bottle to vaporize the alcohol, and the user inhales.Source
For those of us who have hung out with students for a while, there seems to be no end to the experimental ways people will try to get high or drunk. I remember people inhaling carbon dioxide, others huffing aerosol sprays, and others experimenting with crack because someone told them it was like cocaine but a lot safer, and of course the ever-growing abuse/acceptance of marijuana all across the country right now.As the doctor in the video points out, inhaling hard alcohol directly into the lungs is a really, really bad idea physiologically. But that alone has never stopped anyone before.
Questions
- Fess up. Have you tried this? What's the draw? What are the drawbacks? The video above mentions it as a way to get drunk without the calories. Seems like a strange justification to me.
- Are students in your area really doing this? It's hard to tell if this is a real trend or if this is just something that is being reported, which is thus making it a real trend. After all, TIME is the same magazine who brought us butt chugging...
- What else would you need to know about this before educating students about it? Of course, you don't want to teach them about something in order to combat it. But if it's really a trend, it seems like you'd need more to go on.
Photo by Chi (in oz) via Flickr (Creative Commons)