This just in: teenagers no longer need to find a cool 21-year-old to buy them alcohol. The era of sneaking beer and liquor out of your parent’s liquor cabinet and blaming it on your sibling is over. The days of ignorant teenagers paying the outrageously inflated prices to 21-year-olds are over.
All of these things are done for because teenagers have started getting drunk on something so available and so cheap per unit alcohol they would be foolish not to buy it. What is this miraculously cheap alcohol and why haven’t you known about it until now? Right now I bet you could ask your neighbor for some, and without a question they would share it with you. You may be pleasantly surprised to find out it is plain and simple hand sanitizer. That’s right Purell , Germ-X, Lysol and a handful of other popular hand sanitizers all utilize ethanol as their active ingredients.
Having taken high school chemistry, I was aware alcohol was used as the primary substance in things like hand sanitizers and disinfectants. I had been led to believe not only was the alcohol used either isopropanol or n-propanol (not ethanol which causes inebriation) but if you did try to drink it, there were vomit-inducing inactive ingredients. That’s why I was surprised to learn last night teenagers have started chugging 62 percent ethanol hand sanitizers to get drunk and have been having numerous cases of alcohol poisoning.
At first I didn’t believe it, so I went to my trusty research source-Wikipedia, where I learned, in fact, ethanol, isopropanol and n-propanol are all possibilities as active ingredients. Not convinced I was wrong, I went and checked the Material Safety Data Sheets of the popular hand sanitizers and was shocked to see nearly every brand had ethanol as the only active ingredient, and the only health hazard listed was “may cause inebriation.” And while it did call for induced vomiting if ingested, there was nothing in the product itself to prevent people from drinking it and getting drunk.
So my question is why is alcohol, a product so strictly controlled in the U.S ., so easily attained by everyone the law is supposed to keep it from? Why has the FDA allowed companies to keep producing it this way even though there are safer, identical alternatives? Robitussin and Sudafed , along with their generics, are already strictly controlled, and turning them into hard drugs is not as easy as just chugging hand sanitizer.
The best answer I could find is the producers don’t want to use other alcohols because, if swallowed, they have worse health problems. Well, FDA, think about it. Isopropanol can’t get you drunk, but ethanol can. Why would anyone ever bother drinking the product if they only got sick instead of drunk?
