Kiwis will try almost everything, even when they really shouldn't.

Teenagers swallowing things for a dare feature prominently in the latest figures on people poisoning themselves by deliberately abusing a substance.

Others have taken a bizarre range of plants and chemicals in an effort to achieve a cheap high.

They include a 14-year-old boy who ended up in hospital after drinking a mixture of hot sauce, dishwashing liquid and yoghurt for a dare, and a 15-year-old girl who drank a cup of vinegar.

Other calls to the National Poisons Centre were from people who had swallowed, injected, snorted or otherwise consumed just about every possible type of cleaning product and solvent.

Fly spray was popular with children as young as 12, while a 27-year-old man tried to get high on snorting foot deodoriser. All he got was a nose bleed.

"Nothing surprises us any more," poisons centre operations manager Lucy Shieffelbien said. "It doesn't matter how stupid something is, someone will try it."

Figures released to Stuff show between 200 and 400 people ring up the National Poison Centre each year after deliberately abusing a substance. The majority are referred on for medical assistance.

The most common calls were for people suffering ill-effects after abusing alcohol and other drugs, legal or otherwise, from sherry to methamphetamine.

The list also includes foods that are normally harmless, even tasty, when eaten, but which can be less fun if smoked, snorted or otherwise consumed in an excessive or unusual manner.

Some were substances well known as offering a high, such as drinking methylated spirits or sniffing glue. Others were more difficult to explain, such as scented candles or laxatives.

The figures show reports of abuse are most likely to come from people in their teens and early 20s, tailing off among the older, and perhaps wiser, sections of the population. The oldest caller seeking help after abusing a substance was a 96-year-old in 2012, and the youngest was a 6-year-old last year.

Shieffelbien said the more unusual calls came from teenagers and young people, either after finding claims online that substance could provide a high or after being dared by a friend. Sometimes the callers had been the subject of a prank, with a substances they believed was a drug being replaced by something such as washing powder.

Often Kiwis picked up on dangerous stunts in online videos from overseas, such as the "cinnamon challenge" that took off in 2012 and left some people hospitalised in the United States. There was one recorded call about cinnamon poisoning here in 2012.

"These silly dares are really a gross waste of people's effort and time," Shieffelbien said. "You can imagine emergency department doctors get pretty sick of this silly stuff."

Wellington Hospital emergency medicine specialist Paul Quigley said such incidents were rare, and the patients were usually already inclined to risky behaviour and less educated.

"These are the sorts of drug users who are marginalised even when compared to other drug users."

About a decade ago there was a trend of people injecting mayonnaise, believing wrongly they could enhance their high, but instead suffering blindness and abscesses. Vegemite and household spice, most recently turmeric, have also been injected.

One documented incident in Wellington was of a man looking to get high on a drug known as "bath salts". He mistakenly bought actual bath salts from Kirkcaldies & Stains and injected them. He ended up in Wellington Hospital with an unpleasant burning sensation in his arm.

"In general, all forms of injected drug use are harmful, and that harm is significantly increased when using non-pharmaceutical agents because of infection, adverse chemical reactions and direct toxicity," Quigley said. "It is never a good idea."

HOW DAFT CAN YOU BE?

* A 13-year-old boy was dared to swallow an expanding toy capsule that, when exposed to water, grows to six times its size. He needed an operation to remove the toy before it could choke him.

* A health worker called the poisons centre about a patient who was feeling unwell after drying out silverbeet soaked in kerosene and smoking it.

* A man vomited bile after he drunkenly put a lifejacket light into his beer, and the glowing chemical inside it seeped into his drink.