The bizarre story involving an upstate New York woman who buzzed in at three times the legal blood-alcohol limit after allegedly downing a bottle of vanilla extract led us to ask the question: If it's same proof as rum or vodka, why isn't vanilla extract regulated like liquor ? (Jägermeister is 70 proof, or 35-percent alcohol, while most vanilla extract hovers between 35 and 40 percent.)

People getting drunk or trying to get drunk on household products containing ethanol (the kind of alcohol we mean when we talk about booze) is hardly uncommon. Poison centers and emergency rooms around the country regularly report patients who have to be hospitalized because they downed mouthwash, cough syrup, or alcohol-based flavorings in their attempts to get loaded. In 2004, doctors in Seattle reported a notable case of intoxication in a 16-year-old boy who'd gotten drunk after his friends dared him to down a 12-ounce bottle vanilla extract.

So vanilla extract’s the same proof as Captain Morgan rum, enough to get naive teens and irresponsible middle-aged women into enough trouble to land them in the E.R. or jail. And yet we can buy it in a supermarket next to the giant kiddie-birthday-cake number candles. How does that make any sense?

For that answer, you have to go back to the years just before Prohibition, when trade groups and manufacturers, seeing the writing on the wall, realized that the only way to save their industries was to lobby politicians to write in legal loopholes that would allow them to continue operating. Vanilla extract doesn't just rely on alcohol to extract the essential flavors and fragrances from the vanilla bean and suspend them in a stable solution— it's also required by law to have an alcohol content of at least 35 percent . (Vanilla extract is also the only flavoring deemed important enough for the federal government to officially define standards for.)

Vanilla extract has a lot of thanks to give to the Flavor and Extracts Manufacturers Association , founded in 1909 (69 years before that other FEMA ). FEMA spent much of its early years showering state and federal legislators with thousands of letters arguing that unless the alcohol used in flavor extracts were exempt from the looming Prohibition, their industry, and thus the food industry, would suffer.

(Meanwhile, of course, because ethanol was used as an ingredient in so many different products, other trade associations were making similar arguments for their products. "The joke during Prohibition was that you could never lose your cough and needed your cough syrup," says John Hallagan , FEMA's senior advisor and general counsel. "There were lots of ways of claiming exceptions to get around the laws.")

In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was made the law of the land, and the U.S. was, at least on paper, now an alcohol-free country. But the actual legal mechanisms for enforcing the amendment weren't in place yet. Seeing their last chance to avert disaster, FEMA flooded congressmen with telegrams reading, "We call your attention to the fact that all prohibition [sic] bills now before Congress as worded would destroy our legitimate business." By the time the Volstead Act went into effect the following year, it included a clause that made an exemption for flavor extracts —as long as they were deemed non-potable and a reasonable person wouldn't want to drink them straight.

Though Prohibition was repealed, the groundwork that era laid for defining vanilla extract as a completely different animal than liquor is still solid. Vanilla extract falls mostly under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration as a food product and not the stricter governmental regulations for spirits or liqueur, even though an alien chemist might be hard pressed to tell you what the physical difference between the two is.

A lot of the reason that's still the case is the money. Alcohol used in liquor is taxed at $13.50 per gallon by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (better known as the TTB), the offshoot of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that was formed during federal-bureaucracy shuffle that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Flavor-extract manufacturers pay that amount too, but because their product isn't ultimately going to become an alcoholic beverage, they're entitled to a "drawback," or refund, of $12.50 per gallon . So while liquor behemoth Diageo pays the U.S. government $13.50 per gallon of Captain Morgan rum it makes with an alcohol content of 40 percent, manufacturer Nielsen-Massey effectively pays a much more attractive $1 for every gallon of vanilla extract it makes with the same percentage of alcohol. The vanilla-extract guys would have to shell out a ton more money if they (for whatever reason) decided they wanted to be treated like the liquor guys.

That deal still comes with a catch, though. To qualify as a flavor extract and get that big drawback, a vanilla extract still has to be judged non-potable. The unenviable job of testing vanilla extracts to make sure that no sane, mature, or mentally and emotionally healthy person would want to drink them straight? Yep, that falls to the TTB too, which subjects flavor extracts to a series of tests to make sure they're not going to end up the next big thing at high-school post-prom parties across America.

Which brings us back to the poor souls who drink vanilla extract to get drunk, who probably safely fall outside the common standard for a "reasonable person" by that point. Legislation and obscure tax regulations aren't going to help someone like that, but a good substance-abuse counselor, psychiatrist, or rehab clinic might.