Can a vampire get a buzz if he bites a drunk? What happens if he bites a junkie who’s just shot up?
Mythical/supernatural vampires are purported to have a hell of a regenerative quality–would toxic substances like those have any effect at all on them?
What about real life vampires (aka: blood drinking whackos). Granted, 5 pints of blood from someone flying high at .4 might make it difficult to get drunk–probably have to drain a few victims within the span of an hour–but how about the junkie with a fresh hit–can an effective dose of heroin be absorbed orally by drinking spiked blood (assuming the junkie didn’t take a lethally strong hit to begin with)?
According to Spider Robinson, yes. A key plot point to one of his stories involves just that…a vampire who has become an alcoholic because of feeding on barflies (Pytor’s Story).
I’m going to guess no. You’re talking about substance that is effective in just a 1-4 milligrams distributed throughout the user’s entire bloodstream when injected intravenously. To be effective at all you’d have to not only drink the user’s entire bloodstream, but absorb the drug in its dilute form through your digestive system. Dilution is one of the first treatments recommended to counteract a poison.
It is not unheard of for a euthanized animal to be buried by the owner, then be dug up and eaten by another animal. Sometimes the animal that feeds on the carcase will die. The euthanasia drug is typically a barbituate.
So…a cannibal might have something to worry about.
Well, heroin is much less effective when ingested orally, so … I guess it depends on what the vampire’s digestive system is like. If it just dumps blood directly into the vampire’s bloodstream (and there was a recent thread on what vampires do with the blood they drink, IIRC) then a vampire could probably get wasted by feeding on the blood of a user who had just finished shooting up. If the vampire’s digestive tract works like ours, though … probably not, unless the dosage was truly huge.
In Christopher Moore’s first book Practical Demonkeeping, one of the first scenes involves the demon Catch gets a massive buzz after eating a guy who had just taken a large hit of cocaine – the keeper of the demon even puzzles over the fact that drugs affect the demon, but poisons don’t. And Moore later wrote a vampire love story, Bloodsucking Fiends. So – watch as I masterfully tie this all together now – I bet that Moore’s vampires, at least, would become impaired if they fed on an intoxicated person.
In AtS S4 a plot point revolves around a substance which human users inject themselves with thereby acting as a “filter” of the substance for vampires who feed off them. IIRC the substance is never identified; it’s implied that it’s heroin with some sort of mystical component.
A blood alcohol content of .08% makes you “intoxicated” in most U.S. states these days. Few people can take .4% and still walk. In the U.S., any beer with less than .5% alcohol content can be called non-alcoholic, so the drunkard’s blood wouldn’t even qualify as an alcoholic beverage here!
Spike - "I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flowerperson and spent the next six hours watching my hand move. "
I don’t think that the effect of alcohol (and other psycho-active drugs) is due to the destructive nature of the substance, but rather how that substance interacts with the brains neuro-chemistry. I don’t see this to be different for vampires, nor that their regenerative power would necessarily counteract it.
I don’t know if the mythos addresses it; however, in the mythos as I remember it, vampires are only human in appearance, in all other respects they have no relation to humans.
In fiction, it’s going to be up to the author; however, it makes for an interesting plot point so I suspect most authors are going to use the idea. I do know that Sluggy Freelance and Scandal Sheet both have had vampires using a drunk person as a way to get a buzz on.
The best (which makes no sense at all) was the beginning of Innocence where we see a woman dragging on a cigarette, the newly-evil Angel bites her, and then he cooly exhales the smoke.
A friend of mine took that challenge back in high school. Scrawny dude, drank himself to 0.4 (not 0.04). He remembers some of the night. I don’t think he remembered being sponged off the sidewalk, loaded into the ambulance and taken to the ER to get pumped and cleaned. I certainly remember the aftermath.
[slight hijack] Then there was the SNL skit where a vampire James Woods was questioning potential victims about their sexual activity in an obvious attempt to avoid HIV… IIRC he was having a difficult time finding anyone in NYC living a sufficiently wholesome lifestyle. [/sh]
[hijack of a hijack] Which would make Woods one of the presumably very small fraternity of actors who’ve played both a vampire and a vampire killer (in John Carpenter’s Vampires). [/hoah]
That particular story also contains one of my favorite descriptions from Spider:
(paraphrased)
Jake, describing the breakfast he makes to replace the nutrients Pyotr has filtered from his system…a dozen eggs, cheese, mushrooms, ham, peppers, more cheese, sour cream, bacon…it was no longer an omelette. Now it was a full-scale OM!
Back to the OP: In the Buffyverse, vampires can get drunk, same as regular people, by drinking alcohol. I would assume that that means it is being “metabolized” in some manner. You might have to tap several winos for a buzz, but a vamp could do it. Easier to have a Bloody Mary. :eek:
