Claim: Young women are using tampons soaked in vodka to get high.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, October 2009]
We're hearing that college and high school aged girls are soaking tampons in vodka and inserting them in their vaginas as a new,
undetectable and quick way to get drunk. "Ick" factor aside, I'm wondering if it's true. Thanks!
Origins: There's no clear answer to the question of whether any young women have been trying to get their alcohol buzzes on by inserting vodka-soaked tampons into themselves. While rumors of this practice have been around for at least ten years (our oldest print sighting dates to 1999, but the rumor is likely a fair bit older than that), there's not much to confirm that anyone has actually been doing this. What little information we could find came from statements made in 1999 by the executive director of the Irti Huumeista drug and alcohol center in Finland, who claimed to have received reports of individual cases of girls in eastern Finland using alcohol-soaked tampons.
As to why anyone would want to ingest alcohol in this fashion, three reasons are given for the purported practice: To do away with the problem of the smell of booze on a person's breath, to bypass the stomach and thus more quickly benefit from the full effect of the hooch, and to eliminate the sort of gastric distress that leaves a heavy imbiber clutching the porcelain god at 4 a.m.
The most commonly-given reason, the avoidance of bowery breath, has the least going for it. If one were to ingest vodka vaginally (or anally — the rumor is also expressed that way), the practice wouldn't result in booze-free breath because alcohol
is partially expelled from the body via the lungs. Once liquor is in the blood, at least some of it gets breathed out, which is how breathalyzers measure blood alcohol content.
Also, the rumor's lynchpin, that as long as a teen gal has sweet breath her parents won't know their little darling has been tippling, isn't all that practical. It's not easy to conceal being three sheets to the wind; drunken behavior often gives the game away long before the stink of booze does. Any teen who thinks that avoiding parental detection is nothing but a matter of masking or eliminating the scent is probably in for a rude shock.
Even if putting liquor into direct contact with the mucus membranes of the vagina or rectum worked to speed alcohol into the bloodstream, the practice might come at a cost. Such membranes are sensitive, and the potential burning discomfort of flooding those areas with John Barleycorn's finest could prove memorable and not nearly adequately compensate for having advanced one's inebriation by a matter of minutes.
Some claim that taking in vodka through the insertion of liquor-soaked tampons might (and we're not going to test this theory, so we'll leave it at "might") work to keep one's dinner in place during a fierce night of partying, citing the notion that it avoids the presence of large amounts of alcohol into the stomach, a
presence that works to irritate the lining of that organ and thus prompt regurgitation of its contents. (However, vomiting is one of the body's defense mechanisms against poisoning, so suppressing or avoiding that function is not generally a good idea. In 2005, for example, a woman was charged with negligent homicide for administering a sherry enema that caused the death of her husband from alcohol poisoning.) Another putative reason given for imbibing in this manner is that bypassing the stomach avoids the calories associated with alcohol consumption.
Whether anyone is actually boozing in this fashion, the rumor has become attached to the Scottish rock band Mogwai. According to lore, while trapped in a European tour environment where hooch was hard to come by, the band members soaked tampons in vodka and inserted them into their rectal cavities in order to facilitate the swift and efficient entry of the small available stock of alcohol into their bloodstreams. The group maintains they never did this, and the belief that they did arose from an innocent conversation with a journalist in which mere discussion of the practice was subsequently misremembered by that reporter as the group's having claimed to have participated in the activity themselves.
Barbara "backstage gossip" Mikkelson
Sightings: Vodka-soaked tampons were referenced in an episode of the television crime drama CSI ("Two and a Half Deaths," original air date 8 May 2008).
Last updated: 23 October 2009
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/risque/kinky/vodka.asp
is partially expelled from the body via the lungs. Once liquor is in the blood, at least some of it gets breathed out, which is how breathalyzers measure blood alcohol content.
