I hate to say this, but that’s actually kinda cool. 
Home distillation can be sketchy, though. You can produce methanol in small amounts at the same time, which wouldn’t be a big deal except that it distills off first, so the first hit you take could be entirely methanol, not ethanol, and you’ll end up blind.
Probably not a risk in the small batches he was making because there probably wasn’t enough methanol in the whole batch to matter, but if you’re making large batches, you can get in trouble.
I don’t quite get it, why does drinking dry ice cause trouble breathing?
Plus, its not really clear from the article if the kids actually consumed any of the dry ice. It kinda sounds like they drank the tap water the dry ice had been in, which I’d think would be harmless, or at worse, you’d end up getting part of your lip frozen when a piece of ice floating around the water touched your mouth.
At my high school, some dipshit put dry ice in his pocket because he thought it was cool. His jeans fused to his leg and he had to be taken out in an ambulance for emergency surgery to get everything all unfused.
We weren’t allowed to do dry ice experiments after that.
From the news reports, they had pretty clearly swallowed pieces of dry ice. This is extremely not good, since any tissues it contacts can be damaged, and said tissues are your esophagus and your stomache.
Also, since the dry ices sublimes on contact with warm surroundings, it’s essentially rapidly putting a LOT of gas in your digestive tract – more than can be easily belched out. Sometimes you get gas pains from excessive gas – that’s what this was, only worse, judging from the reports.
You’re right – you won’t get in trouble drinking water that dry ice has been in. Heck, I’ve been at parties where I did that. But these boys weren’t rushed to the hospital for drinking water that had dry ice in it – they went there because they were in extreme pain from internal dry ice burns and gas pressure.
“Troubled breathing” was mentioned as why the third boy was still hospitalized. I wonder if he might have aspirated some dry ice into his lungs if he choked while trying to swallow the stuff, or coughed a piece out of his esophagus/stomach and into his airway. That would cause burns there and might put a whole lot of cold/CO2/carbonic acid into his lungs.
Excessive CO2 gas in the airway will cause ‘trouble breathing’ in the form of immediate discomfort. If you’ve ever accidentally inhaled the contents of the top of a large glass as you were bringing a freshly-poured soda to your mouth, you may have experienced this.
You’re right that it’s pretty harmless to drink the water that dry ice has sublimated in. It’ll just be cold (but still liquid) and carbonated. We used to make carbonated iced coffee backstage with the leftovers from the dry ice fogger.
Many years ago, I bought this t-shirt for my boyfriend. I find myself compelled to wear it occasionally.
Could someone possibly mention a story like this that DIDN’T take place in MA? So far, we’ve had Everett schoolboys, WPI and MIT.
You’re making us look bad.
I suppose I should mention that some kids in one of the chemistry classes at my school (in Worcester) added sodium (might have been potassium - not sure) to water - for fun - in the classroom.
It didn’t occur to me at the time but I wonder if that was the reason we spent a couple of months having chemistry class in the music room…hmmm…
They didn’t sound like a case where they freeze-burned their insides, though. All the reports in the OP said they told their teacher they were having trouble breathing, not writhing around on the ground in agony like I’d expect someone with a frost-bitten esophogus to do.(compare the story linked above where the guy swallowed liquid Nitrogen and was “unable to feel anything but intense pain” and seems to have passed out pretty quickly).
Plus the mechanics of trying to swallow something that burns on contact. I could maybe see a small pellet of the stuff going down before you had a chance to try and spit it back out, but I think getting anything more then that would be tough unless you were actively trying to kill yourself.
I’m thinking they just got a lung full of CO2 when the went to drink out of the beaker, had trouble breathing for a bit, got scared and told the teacher, who understandably called the EMS.
When I was a child, one of the church picnics I went to used dry ice to keep the popsicles and soda pop cold. To us, the “dry ice” that we saw keeping things cold was something to be curious about. We knew what “wet ice” was, of course; it was frozen water. What made “dry ice” dry?
The adults were little help. Answers like “frozen carbon dioxide” don’t mean much to ten-year-olds. We were told not to touch it, and we didn’t, but one kid got curious–if we couldn’t touch it, what else could we do? Well, we could use a stick to push some onto a piece of paper and carry it to a nearby pond, where once submerged, it bubbled satisfactorily, giving off what we thought was smoke. We could try touching it with other objects too–a popsicle stick did nothing, and neither did a leaf, but touching it with a nickel caused it to scream. Cool! The screaming dry ice attracted the adults though, who strongly suggested a visit to the playground might be in order. We never resumed our experiments with dry ice at that picnic.
But we certainly never thought of eating it.
In my husband’s case, he got a lump of it that had been encased in regular ice due to floating around in the beverage, and swallowed it without really thinking of what it might be, as his drink wasn’t smoking. We’re assuming that it slid down nicely with the drink, melting some, then hit the stomach acid and sublimated into a big volume of gas pretty damned quickly, causing him to vomit and have a very sore stomach.
The kids might have gotten a lungful of CO2+carbonic acid, sure, and might also quite easily have gotten little pieces of ice-coated dry ice in their stomachs too.
According to the news reports and an interview with one of the kids, they were mixing the dry ice with other things. The dry ice might have gonbe down with a coating of other stuff, as in the case of Ferret Herder’s husband, and only reacted in the stomach. From their description, it sounded like more than just CO2 in the lungs to me.
Well, is it OK to eat dry ice after it sits out for a while and gets to about room temperature?
Wait, I think I just answered my own question :smack:
Well, looking at this chart, in order to keep carbon dioxide a solid at room temperature, it would have to be at several thousand bars of pressure. I can’t imagine anything at that pressure would be safe to eat.
Cal, That is too tame for NH kids. They need to do something really dangerous for it to be fun… Like attach electrodes to themselves and then plug themselves in!
Jell-O. There’s always room for Jell-O.
Unbelievable. Why would anyone that knows you can’t touch dry ice think to eat it. That is amazing. There is a site all about dry ice. This site warns about eating dry ice. Mostly it warns about touching it… I bet they thought that no one would ever eat it. Unbelievable.