What would happen if someone was to inject a few cc’s of Everclear (or any other near 100% grain alcohol). Due to the fact that it’s going straight to your heart, would it kill you? Or would you simply go through all the stages of drunkenness in a matter of minutes? Please help, some of the guys here almost have a co-worker convinced to trying it tonight.
Your co-worker will probably die from his little experiement.
Intoxication, or the feeling of bein drunk basically comes from the body breaking the alchohol down into sugars, etc in the liver. Injecting it directly into the blood is a VERY foolhardy thing to do, because the body has no way of breaking it down without the pass through the digestive system. The body can’t take pure alcohol without breaking it down into different compounds. I’m no doctor, but by injecting himself with booze, he will be poisoning his blood.
First of all, I am not a doctor. Consult one if you want real advice. That said…
From reading web pages, (and we all know how accurate those are!) here is what I can gather:
Injecting alcohol is very dangerous. The dangers are twofold:
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One, the alcohol hits your bloodstream instantly and in much greater concentration than if it was filtered through your stomach. Someone who could normally drink a whole bottle of vodka would fall over dead from injecting that much alcohol.
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Two, if you don’t know what you’re doing with the needle, you can introduce air bubbles into your bloodstream, which can lodge in the brain and cause an embolism, brain damage, and possibly death.
That said, I’m afraid I don’t agree with Lissa on a few points… -
Alcohol’s intoxicating effects are not caused by the alcohol breaking down into sugars. They are directly caused by alcohol in the bloodstream crossing the blood-brain barrier and “pickling” your brain cells. (Think about that the next time you go on a drinking binge. ;])
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It’s your liver, not your intestines, that breaks down alcohol. And your liver operates directly on your bloodstream. The danger of injecting alcohol comes from the alcohol being much more concentrated when injecting directly, and much more of it getting into your bloodstream. This means your liver has a much larger and harder job to do cleaning it up when you inject it.
I would advise your friend that this is a very risky way to get drunk. If drinking alcohol is no longer sufficient to get impaired, I would simply stop drinking entirely for several months. Your alcohol tolerance should drop away and the next time you drink it should all be good again.
I am attempting not to be judgemental here, but I would
also say that if drinking everclear (as opposed to injecting it) is not sufficient to get you drunk, then you’re definitely an alcoholic and need to get to treatment, pronto. Remember, denial is one of the primary symptoms of addiction.
-Ben
As long as there is a test subject who is injecting plain saline, the experiment should go on. (please note: my tongue is firmly in cheek)
We’ve been over this before, but I can’t find the old thread.
Agreed, it is a dangerous and stupid thing to do. The consensus before seemed to be that it wasn’t neccesarily a way to kill yourself depending on the amount injected, and all the other dangers of messing with needles in the first place. Nevertheless, a dangerous and stupid thing to do.
My anecdote in this area is that when I was living in a dormitory there was a guy in that dorm reputed to have shot 151 rum with a hypodermic. At least Everclear is fairly pure alcohol, not full of various other compounds like the rum would be. This guy was one of the more seriously deranged people I’ve encountered, and I could believe that he did it.
I am a doc, and ModernRonin2 has it mostly right. Air embolism is pretty unlikely, or IV heroin and cocaine users would die of this far more frequently.
IV alcohol (ethanol, the drinking kind) was used in past days to arrest premature labor, before the onset of more modern (if not more effective drugs) like terbutalene. It is still used at times in cases of methanol poisoning. But the key is to dilute it! Taking it straight would burn like hell, and would kill off at least some of the venous lining. Not sure if it would still be concentrated enough to affect the heart directly, but it would hurt. Ethanol is used in its pure form to kill, fix and preserve tissue samples.
Here’s a protocol for using ethanol via IV:
http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/mmi/jmoodie/v03bhtml.html#Methanol
I don’t like this, so I’m closing it. Please do not inject anything “experimentally” into your body. - Jill