People drink wines, whisky, rum, vodka, beer, etc and they get drunk
OK, alcohol is a way of socializing and in the old days it was a way of getting something clean to drink.
But I was thinking could simply “dehydrate” the vodka or whatever and produce a pill that would get you drunk without having to drink the actual drink.
I am assuming you can but I thought I’d ask. If so, do they have a pill like this?
OP, don’t forget the other reason people drink. I like good beer and will try something new each week from the expansive well stocked shelves of my local liquore store. I also like a good Scotch and a good bottle of claret.
I drink them all not to get drunk but because it is enjoyable.
I realize chemically, it ain’t alcohol, but one of my friends acts just like he is drunk after he takes a couple. I don’t know anyone else that (ab)uses it, so I don’t know if that reaction is peculiar to Scott.
It would have to be a pretty big pill. A bottle of beer is 355ml, 5% alcohol, by volume = 17.75 ml alcohol. Alcohol is 80% as dense as water, so the alcohol in that bottle weighs about 14 g.
Now consider the weight and size of the pill you’d need for that amount of alcohol. Dehydrated alcohol is simply a volatile liquid, so you have two ways to go here: You can simply pour the alcohol into a capsule and keep it in its liquid form, or you can absorb it with another substance like the great humanitarians who invented alcohol powder seem to have done.
Alcohol powder apparently involves a sugar derivative which will absorb 60% of its own weight in alcohol. So your 14g of alcohol will need to be combined with 23 g of stuff, giving you 37 g of dry alcohol powder. You might or might not have to add other stuff to make that stay in a coherent tablet form. By comparison, an extra strength Tums tablet weighs less than 2 g. So you’d have to take the equivalent of about 20 Tums to consume the alcohol in one bottle of beer.
Alcohol potentiates the sedative effects of antihistamines. I.e. antihistamines make you drowsy, but antihistamines with even a little bit of alcohol knock you the fuck out.
Valium and the other benzodiazepines have a method of action similar to alcohol. They act on inhibitory GABA receptors in the brain to slow neuronal firing. Benzodiazepines are used to treat potentially fatal acute alcohol withdrawal in clinical detoxes to minimize withdrawal symptoms. Benzodiazepine addiction can be just as ugly as alcoholism itself however.
There is a similar class of drugs called barbiturates that are even closer to alcohol in action. They aren’t commonly found on the street or used in clinical settings much either but they have been for things like fabled ‘truth serums’ that induce drunk talk. It is easy to earn your ticket to a one-way trip to the morgue by taking barbiturates on your own especially if you mix them with alcohol so it is not recommended. The 1970’s street drug, quaaludes in pill form, was also very similar in action to quaaludes and alcohol but is not around much these days.
It turns out, if you just want the effects of alcohol, you are best off just buying vodka which is ideally just alcohol with the water premixed in for you.
I’m sure the reason it isn’t done is because you can easily get alcohol poisoning from doing that.
Plus you need a lot of gel caps. An ounce of 190 proof everclear equals about 2.5oz of whiskey or about 2 beers. You’d need 20 or so caps just to get an ounce of everclear.