I’m curious about people who apply 20-30 squirts of hand sanitizer through the course of a day, or use an enormous dollop (say, five or ten times the usual amount) in one sanitizing go on their hands. Doesn’t this mean they’re either inhaling or absorbing a lot of ethyl alcohol?
There is no evidence I am aware of to suggest intoxication or dependence could occur with use of ABHRs.
Have you seen something indicating otherwise?
Interesting question.
There are a couple of sites on Google that say most of the alcohol evaporates before any absorption takes places. But any that actually happens is minimal. I wonder how much and often one would have to use before enough was absorbed to register on a blood test. One need not be intoxicated to still have a BAC measure.
About a year ago I took a theft complaint from a tech school regarding someone breaking into the plastic dispensing stations and stealing the bags the liquid gel comes in. Turned out to be a homeless man. He was drinking the stuff. Blech!
I remember reading a story ten or so years ago about a patient in an Australian hospital for alcohol abuse treatment who drank several of the hand sanitizer containers.
Inhalation of ethanol vapor from hand sanitizer has at least been looked at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367283/
Transdermal absorption, too:
Perhaps to establish a baseline, someone would soak their hand in vodka for a few minutes and report back?
Also a lot of them are isopropyl, not ethanol.
In the course of a normal day, pathologists, not to mention the especially bug-phobic ones like me will go through a ton of hand cleaning and sanitizing products, often alcohol-based. I have never yet notiaced any intoxxi
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An interesting question. I note that when I buy hand sanitizer at the grocery store, the register does not prompt the cashier to check for ID, but when I buy one of those Christmas fruit cakes (I forget the exact name), it does. A loophole for kids looking to get drunk?
Seems like a waste, but if it’s of any help, I’ve been soaking my internal organs in it for years (with ice and a vermouth-pickled onion) and it works great! 
Great. We’ll use your case study at the front of the intro section in the published monograph.
Just in case anyone’s seriously considering it, don’t drink hand sanitizer, or any other form of alcohol not meant to be drunk. Even if it’s ethanol, there’s usually other ingredients added that you wouldn’t want to drink.
FWIW a co-worker of mine is a recovered alcoholic and is super careful to avoid consumption of alcohol (not just drinks but food that has been cooked with it too).
She has zero problem with hand sanitizers.
Anecdotal I know but she is so super careful about her exposure to alcohol I kinda gotta go with her that hand sanitizer is not a problem.
Yep. It’s called being denatured and it can make one feel like they are going to die and afraid they won’t.
Bu that doesn’t stop some people from drinking all sorts of stuff from mouthwash to wood polish. I had one guy drinking starting fluid out of a spray can. Ethyl alcohol and ether cocktail.
What’s weird about that is a 24 ounce can of Kick Axe or Earthquake malt liquor 12-14% abv is only 99 cents around here. It just tastes worse than wood polish.
The skin is impermeable actually. The alcohol only ever makes contact with the outermost layers of your skin. It won’t get absorbed into the bloodstream.
I worked with a special-needs teen once who had a history of licking the sanitizer off his hands. His parents asked us to have him wash his hands with soap instead. Poor kid.
Isopropyl is intoxicating as well. Back when I worked in the drug rehab industry we had a client/patient whose preference was for rubbing alcohol because (back then - not so much during 2020) it was so cheap and easy to obtain. Yeah, he was messed up.
It is possible to inhale sufficient alcohol vapor to get drunk, but it would have to be a LOT of it and I doubt the average person would be able to tolerate the resulting irritation, that’s more an effect found industrial accidents. I suppose it’s possible to absorb toxic levels through the skin if you were immersed in it, but that’s not what is happening either.
I very much doubt that even heavy use of hand sanitizer - in the intended manner, not by drinking it - is going to lead to intoxication. Could alcohol be detected in the breath or blood? Maybe, with a sensitive enough test. You can also frequently detect alcohol in the body after drinking a glass of fruit juice because they ferment so readily, even if no intoxication results from it. Maybe that’s why FAA set permissible level of blood alcohol for pilots is not zero - so they can have a glass of orange juice at breakfast without losing their jobs over it.
We get trace amounts of alcohol in our food and drink - that’s probably why the human body is able to process ethanol. Getting trace amounts by using hand sanitizer is not an issue.
I wonder–would rubbing the stuff on your face change things?
Capillaries on the fave & nose awre close to the surface, aren’t they?
You might not absorb it through the skin, but surely you could breathe the fumes. I remember making model aeroplanes with balsa wood and glue in my youth…:0