Smoking Booze

In the ultimate example of misguided health-consciousness, Skippy62able on YouTube decided he needed a way to get hammered without getting fat. His genius idea? Inhaling!

What he does is a boozy version of a classic school-level science experiment: pump air into a bottle with a bit of water in it, swirl so that the air gets saturated with water vapour, and suddenly release the pressure. The resultant drop in temperature makes water vapour condense to make fog. He does this with alcoholic beverages, and then inhales the vapour. He claims to get very drunk in the process.

Now, there is some validity to the concept of huffing alcohol to get drunk. As I've just pointed out in Wikipedia, your liver gets a chance to remove some of the alcohol that you drink before it gets a chance to addle your brain. If you breathe it in, however, it gets absorbed in your lungs, goes back to your heart, and then to your body and brain via the aorta and carotid artery, respectively. Theoretically, you'll get drunker faster off the same amount of alcohol if you inhale it.

Of course, you won't dodge all the calories. According to this article, alcohol contributes a very significant part of the energy of most alcoholic beverages. For example, most of the energy from a beer comes from the alcohol, even though it still contains some carbs. Even though you might sweat and pee out some more of the alcohol because it bypasses the liver the first time around, you'll still metabolise most of it.

The actual demonstration is completely fake, for a number of reasons.

First, although the pressure release cause some dramatic vapour, all the air that escapes the bottle is booze that you lose. If you really wanted to get all that ethanolic goodness, you'd want to inhale the escaping air.

Second, he only takes one hit from each drink, leaving most of the alcohol still sloshing around in the liquid phase!.  Even if he were to inhale all the vapour from the bottle, he really wouldn't get much out of it. Let's see what the maximum would be. A very generous assumption is that the vapour is in equilibrium with the liquid when he inhales it, so the amount of alcohol depends on the concentration in the liquid phase.  Let's see:

• Beer - about 5%
• Pre-blended alcohol/energy drink  - up to 12%
• Champagne - maybe 15%
• Vodka and tonic (about 1:2, guessing at flow rates) - about 40/3 = 13%
• Whiskey and cola (about 1 to 1) - about 20%
• Branded RTD beverage - about 5%
• Box Merlot - about 13%
• Branded German herbal liqueur and energy drink (about 1:3) - about 35/4 = almost 9%

I calculated the amount of ethanol in the vapour phase, using vapour-liquid equilibrium from Chemsof.  By my calculations, each time he gets only about 5% of a gram, assuming he can breathe in about 1.5 L each time, and it's all absorbed by the lungs.  In the end, he gets less than a tenth of the alcohol that he would have gotten from one shot of that Vodka.

So how do you explain his "saturated" breathalyser?  Very simple: he either drank alcohol during the camera breaks, or else he held some alcohol in his mouth while breathing over it.

Now what would one do if one wanted to get high off alcohol without drinking it?  My immediate idea was something like a hookah.  If you could bubble air through booze for long enough, you'd extract most of the ethanol and deliver it to your lungs. Apparently this is not new. Alcohol without liquid sells something similar, and makes some unsurprising claims.  Apparently it takes around 20 minutes of inhaling to get sloshed.