Getting Drunk on Hand Sanitizer

Apparently, you can get drunk on hand sanitizers, though there is a downside to it:

In the first incident, the young man had been admitted to the emergency department for abdominal pain. When the staff left him unsupervised, the patient removed a bottle of the antibacterial liquid from a dispenser on the wall and downed it.

Since the liquid is mostly isopropanol, not drinking alcohol, he quickly became quite ill. Doctors tried unsuccessfully to revive him with naloxone, a drug used to treat opiate overdoses. As the situation worsened, his kidneys stopped working and he had trouble breathing. Physicians intubated him and moved him to an intensive care unit. At that time, his girlfriend indicated that her beau has a history of drinking rubbing alcohol. Blood tests showed that she wasn't kidding.

Two months later, after making a recovery and being released from the hospital, the same guy had done it again. He had come back for more. Just like the previous incident, he was admitted to the emergency room with complaints of abdominal pain. When the doctors were ready to send the antiseptic addict home, he claimed to be suicidal. True to his word, he removed another bottle of hand sanitizer from the wall and finished it off.

The medical center learned from this, and replaced the dispenser with one that is hard to remove from the wall!

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/the-downside-of.html

Don't try this at home, all right? Drinking methanol, isopropanol and denatured alcohol can make you sick, go blind, drop into a coma, or even die.


I once rotated thru a Psychiatric ward as a student, and one of my patients was caught drinking Vitalis. After Vitalis was prohibited, he began straining white shoe polish through bread.
Very innovative...
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1. re the sanitizer drinker: if a patient is suicidal - don't leave him alone in the room!

2. what's Vitalis?

3. if you're going to ingest something harmful and nasty like shoe polish, what's the advantage in straining it?
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"if you’re going to ingest something harmful and nasty like shoe polish, what’s the advantage in straining it?"

Ever try to pee shinola? Obviously not.

All this reminds me of a Russian carpenter I worked with: as little kids in the Russia of the 80s, they would drink stolen bottles of perfume. To get the (equivalently) dollar-a-bottle vodka, they would break into the morgue of the neighboring hospital and steal the coins put on the eyes of the dead. Found syringes would also double as squirt guns.
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