I have heard that in certain circles there exists a practice of funneling/pumping alcohol into the rectum, and since it is a mucous membrane the body absorbs it and makes the… participant, rather drunk rather fast.
Some part of me wants to say this is bogus, but it seems logical. Don’t worry, I’m not interested in trying it. But I am interested in knowing if this can really be done, and what the possible dangers of doing so are.
I’ve definately read about it. I’ve also read about people dying from the practice. Nothing like anal alcohol poisoning to make for an interesting obituary.
That’s one way to get drunk off your ass.
Supposedly popular with Polish students in particular according to one well rounded urban legend.
The beverage is not absorbed by mucous membranes of the rectum, but rather in the lower intestine (colon), which is “designed” for absorbing fluids into the bloodstream.
There are significant dangers of alcohol poisoning. A search on “alcohol enema” will show you a particularly celebrated case of a man who died after receiving a sherry enema from his wife, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.47%. There was another case of poisoning by isopropyl alcohol, but that’s poisonous even if you drink it.
I haven’t found anything from a medical authority. I would expect medical authorities would frown on it.
Does rectal absorption cause more alcohol to be absorbed into the blood, or is it more a case of people, um, “drinking” too much when they do this? I imagine that one could probably pour in an entire bottle of booze at one sitting (prostration?) whereas you would never swallow that much normally.
That would be the “sphincter”.
Sorry, but I’ve got to hijack this thread for a moment. It could ultimately save your life.
A number of years ago I was watching one of those extreme survival shows, the kind that are a dime a dozen these days but were rare back then. It told the story of a British (?) family that were stranded at sea in a life raft. They ran out of fresh water and were in danger of dehydration. Fortunately, the mom had some medical knowledge, having been a nurse or something along those lines. She gave her family seawater enimas. Apparently the lower intestines will absorb the water, but not the salt. It saved their lives.
That’s one trick I’m not likely to forget.
(BTW, the only *other * thing I remember from the show was that the parents eventually got divorced.)
Well, a week or two of sumping sea water up each others’ asses will take the mystery and romance out of any relationship.
Not to mention explaining the barnacles …
I am not a biologist, nor any sort of medical professional, but I do know a bit about fluid diffusion through a membrane. And this sounds fishy to me. Keeping the salt from being absorbed would be easy, but getting the water to be absorbed (rather than going the other way, from the body to the intestines) would be very difficult. Either the environment on the other side of the intestinal wall would have to have a higher solute concentration than seawater (which I don’t think is the case for any human tissue), or the intestines would have to employ some terribly over-engineered active molecular pump, which is highly unlikely to have evolved (since it’d be a complicated and expensive system with essentially no selective benefit). Plus, most of the digestive system’s absorbtion of water happens in the large intestine anyway, so if you could subsist on seawater enemas, you’d be able to subsist on drinking it, too.
Sorry, a big NO!! for this one. And I am a doctor.
A seawater enema would pull water out of the body via the colon. And accelerate dehydration.
In fact, a standard recipe for salt water enemas is 1 tsp. of salt in 1 quart of fresh water. When given, it doesn’t overload the kidneys so much as a pure fresh water enema would, because much less water is absorbed due to that very small amount of salt! Double the concentration of salt in that recipe, and it will begin to pull fluids out of the body. A quart of seawater has close to 10 times that much salt in it!
Please don’t post dangerous falsehoods, stuyguy. We do try to uphold certain standards in GQ.
The latter. If you drink enough alcohol to kill yourself, you have at least some chance of throwing up and purging yourself of unabsorbed alcohol before you absorb enough of it to die. If you have enough alcohol up your ass to kill you, you’ll just absorb it all and die.
Not that a doctor needs verification; I agree completely with what QtM says. I’d like to add my 2 cents.
My college biology professor said that those poor unfortunate who have been stranded floating in the ocean and drank the sea water did die of dehydration. Upon being examined once found by an ME, their lower intestines were found to be full of water. This water had been osmosized out of their blood by the presence of salt water in their digestive tract.
Yes, it will get them drunk fast. Alcohol starts being absorbed as soon as it’s in your mouth. But at the input end, your alimentary canal has many safeguards to hopefully keep you from poisoning yourself: taste buds, throat nerves being irritated, stomach nausea.
But butt shooters have no safety net. You can’t really “spit” out the fluids if your body rejects them. They’ll just be absorbed (quickly), and jack your BAC to phenominal (and likely fatal) levels.
I heard about someone who “did” cocaine this way… That colostomy bag sure was a bummer at parties after that…
Just a random addition. Alcohol coming out of the stomach and small intestine will pass through the liver first, I don’t think that applies to the lower colon. I’m not sure how much alcohol is normally metabilized on it’s first pass through the liver, but for certain medications it’s a significant loss, That might contribute to a more rapid onset of toxic levels.
It’s true that lower intestines will absorb water and will not absorb salt. HOWEVER this could only happen if there were more salt inside your tissues than seawater.
There’s a reason that laxative enemas are made of salt solutions. They pull water out of your body into the colon, making everything smooth and dehydrating you slightly.