[youtube]kdXwR7dGzU8[/youtube]
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As a medic, should I examine any intoxicated woman for the presence of a vodka-soaked tampon?
No.
This appears to be just another case of wildly inaccurate information about drugs from law enforcement, like becoming addicted to a drug, other than oxygen, after just one use.
Documented cases? OK. Produce them.
Why do they spend so much time with the camera on a male police school resource officer? Does he have a vodka-soaked tampon inserted someplace? Are they going to connect this with satanic sex abuse rituals at daycare centers?[1]
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One place to find out about this is snopes.com, which goes into detail about the flaws of this idea, but they conclude that the story is undetermined.[2]
This is not even a recent story. It was covered by snopes a couple of years ago, but the story apparently comes from the 1990s.
Does vaginal absorption of alcohol keep the aroma of alcohol off your breath?
The lungs excrete about 5% during exhalation (breathing out). Alcohol excretion by the lungs forms the basis for Breathalyzer testing.[3]
This is not going to affect the amount of alcohol being excreted by the lungs. Suck on a breath mint and that will not change the alcohol coming out of your lungs. Eat bread and that won’t, either. The breathalyzer is not interested in aroma, but in the alcohol it can measure.
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At 2 a.m., a clerk at the Circle K called to report Walls had been in the convenience store and she was pretty sure she had shoplifted a package of tampons. Police arrived and found Walls in the passenger seat of a Ben Wells’ truck with a bottle of Screwdriver vodka and a box of tampons, which she admitted shoplifting.[4]
Was she planning some alternative alcohol activity or did she just happen to be in the same place at the same time?
Is this an example of a documented case of using a tampon to consume vodka?
Then there is the comment from the video (at about 2:40) –
A super tampon can hold about a shot of vodka.
One whole shot?
With each tampon?
If anything, this will discourage consumption of large amounts of alcohol.
I have a confession to make. I do not have a vagina. However, I do not see any reason to believe that women are going to be developing a multi-tampon habit to consume alcohol.
Vodka tampons will burn going in.
Vodka tampons will burn coming out.
Vodka tampons will only deliver one shot at a time.
A less than 150 pound woman, with 200 proof alcohol, can reach the legal intoxication level with one shot. The same is true for drinking one shot of 200 proof liquor. 200 proof alcohol is probably less painful orally, than vaginally. The vagina has to be much more sensitive.
This is not a problem.
If we want to convince teens that alcohol is not good for them, we should encourage them to try vodka-soaked tampons.
We can start early, so that we can use it as a threat. Eat all of your vegetables. It’s your choice, eat the vegetables or insert a vodka-soaked tampon.
This will lead parents to use the phrase –
Spare the vodka-soaked tampon, spoil the child.
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Footnotes:
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[1] Day-care sex-abuse hysteria
Wikipedia
Article
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[2] Boozing It Up!
snopes.com
Article
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[3] Metabolism (elimination)
emedicinehealth.com
Alcohol Intoxication
Article
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[4] POLICE REPORTS
November 15, 2011
Salem News
Article
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Just to note, this would presumably reduce the odor of “alcohol” on the breath, in the sense that we don’t typically smell alcohol on the breath, but rather the flavorants and other by-products associated with many liquors and alcoholic beverages. If you could avoid drinking these orally, your breath would probably be okay even if your blood alcohol level was elevated due to ethanol absorbed orally, vaginally, rectally, IV, IO, or sucked through the toenails…
Brandon O,
Isn’t that supposed to be one of the charms of vodka? Much less odor of alcohol. People won’t realize when we’ve been hitting the bottle. 😉
When you breathe out alcohol, there will be an odor. I suppose we could have someone try alcohol IV and have them breathe on people to see if they notice any odor. We should probably have someone consuming vodka orally and someone else not consuming any alcohol as control groups. Perhaps at EMS Today. There should be plenty of medical supervision, if not adult supervision, available. 😉
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As a reader of the female persuasion, all I have to say about the notion of alcohol-soaked tampons is….OUCH! Alcohol anywhere near there is painful, and I say this as someone who was once accidentally given alcohol prep wipes for a clean-catch urine analysis. Any chemical ending in -oh is not a good thing in sensitive areas!
Anon,
Thank you for answering that question. A sex change operation on my part would have provided some insight into that question, but I am only willing to do so much for this blog.
I believe you.
Thank you for the information. I hope the recovery from the pain was quick.
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Doesn’t really touch on the medical aspects of the story, but would you want your kids going to a school where the “school resource officer” was dressed in full SWAT gear? Of course, Maricopa County is also home to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, which might have something to do with it…
Mr618,
Good catch. I missed the caption information. They did show a police patch at one point. Maybe he is also a peace officer. Maybe they could not get anyone from the police department to comment on this.
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Not sure exactly how much of a difference there really is, however I know alcohol, when consumed orally, doesn’t ALL make it all the way to the point it affects you. Some of it is broken down via digestive acids, adsorbed and trapped from food in the body, Time it takes to digest the alcohol, and other barriers along the way. An md friend and I got into the topic of what factors really determine how drunk you get off a certain adult beverage. theres a lot more to it than I’d expected. So I wouldn’t doubt a shot of vodka taken through “alternate means”ends up delighting more alcohol than simply drinking it. How much difference, theres no telling. Could be 10x a much, could be almost nothing. Either way, I still think it’s a pretty dumb idea, but let’s not forget, this is the same generation of kids who came up with the idea of putting animal feces in a bag and inhaling the fumes. I wouldn’t put it past them to try something like this. Google ha turned us into amateur scientists, and I could imagine after watching “steve-o” IV vodka on jackass, someone got to thinking of other, less pointy, just as effective means of getting wasted 🙂
Jeremy,
I think these have more to do with the rate alcohol reaches the blood, rather than the total amount that reaches the blood.
If I were to drink a shot on an empty stomach, or donate blood, then drink a shot on an empty stomach, the rate should not be that much different.
We also need to consider that some of the vodka is likely to squeeze out of the tampon during insertion. Tampons are designed to be inserted before they have absorbed liquid, not fully saturated.
The amount of alcohol that remains in the tampon may be much less than the single shot it could hold without being inserted.
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Late reply. But route of “ingestion” makes a difference. Oral alcohol is absorbed in the GI, meaning that it undergoes first pass metabolism in the liver, and less makes it to systemic circulation. Tampon vodka on the other hand misses the portal vein and hits systemic circulation immediately, with no loss of product along the way. Also the vagina and rectum are highly vascularized mucus membranes promoting rapid, high concentration absorbtion..
On a side note, here in florida, our SROs are deputy sheriffs. They’re the cops who got in trouble, so instead of administrative leave, got put on school duty. (when I was in high school, I was preceded by an older, less “responsible” brother, who got arrested along with an off-duty sheriff at a strip club for harassing the entertainers (relentlessly trying to sell the strippers coke) and 2 years later when I got to high school, the cop my brother got arrested with was my SRO.( the cops in the town I lived in, in the panhandle of florida, abided by exactly 0 laws, and instead ran off of the “good ol boy” system. )
Jeremy,
So, if a cop were to get in trouble for inappropriate behavior around high school girls, his punishment would be to spend more time in a position of authority over the same girls?
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