KPHO, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix, marvels at the kids today, with their vodka-soaked tampons and butt chugging:

"This is not isolated to any school, any city, any financial area," Officer Chris Thomas, a school resource officer, said. "This is everywhere."… "What we're hearing about is teenagers utilizing tampons, soak them in vodka first before using them," Thomas said. "It gets absorbed directly into the bloodstream. There's no barrier, there's no stomach acid to prevent it," Thomas said…. "This is definitely not just girls," Thomas said. "Guys will also use it and they'll insert it into their rectums." And that's not all. "Using a beer bong rectally is the same concept as a vodka soaked tampon," Thomas said. Rather than the traditional beer bong you'd find at a college party, kids are sticking the tube elsewhere to get wasted. They're calling it "butt chugging."

A Nexis search turns up no earlier mentions of butt chugging—not even in a South Park plot summary. But news outlets have been fitfully fascinated by tampon tippling over the years:

Reuters, March 1999: "Some teen-age Finnish girls are experimenting with tampons dipped in vodka as a way of getting tipsy without parents detecting boozy breath, an anti-drinking group said yesterday." A May 2003 review of a Vic Chesnutt album in the St. Louis Riverfront Times mentioned his "hilarious" song "Band Camp," in which he "recounts the story of a high-school girl who soaked a tampon in vodka and fell off her stool in science class." At a September 2009 "drug detection forum" in Bangor, Maine, according to the Bangor Daily News, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Amy Dorsey warned that "tampons can be soaked in vodka and inserted rectally to get drunk." A March 2011 op-ed piece in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Patriot News listed "soaking tampons with alcohol to insert vaginally for women and anally for men" as one of several "alcohol-consumption methods [that] aim to enhance absorption by dumping booze directly into the blood stream." The others: "pouring alcohol into eyes" and "brushing teeth until bloody and then drinking." A May 2011 story in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Express-Times claimed "using a tampon soaked in vodka" is "gaining popularity because it's a discreet way to get drunk." Contradicting these other accounts, a November 2010 USA Today story about "a bizarre method of trying to get plastered by absorbing alcohol through the eyeball" also mentioned "the use of vodka-soaked tampons for both women and men" as a "generally ineffectual means of becoming inebriated."

But you never know for sure until you try it, kids!

Snopes.com lists the truth status of this tale as "undetermined."

[Thanks to Max Minkoff for the tip.]