So, it seems inhaling alcohol fumes is the Trendy New Thing. Again.
Now it's called a "Vaportini".
The linked article has a couple of scary quotes from a doctor, plus this:
Unlike drinking alcohol, where the liquid is metabolized through one’s liver, inhaling alcoholic vapors sends ethanol straight to the lungs, the blood stream and ultimately, the brain.
And the reporter got this where? Like so many alarming medical claims, this rests on profound ignorance of basic anatomy, and is well into "not even wrong" territory. Through the liver? Really?
From the doctor in question, there's this:
“The danger mainly is that it leads to rapid intoxication in that you don't know you're getting drunk that fast,” Glatter said.
Which does make sense; it's at least plausible that taking a deep breath of air with a sufficient concentration of alcohol vapor would lead to rapid absorption through the vast surface area of the lungs. Whether it's actually right or not is another question (to which I don't have the answer offhand, but if I weren't so lazy I'd start looking at things like the vapor pressure of ethanol at 37°C, the average volume of a deep breath, and the volume of blood that you're trying to raise to ~ 0.1% ABV).
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