If there’s one thing we should have learned from Prohibition it’s that people are going to find a way to party and have a good time one way or another.

If something’s illegal, they’ll either find a way to get it anyway or they’ll just make do with something else.

And this can create some unsafe situations as people end up getting what they’re looking for from potentially questionable black market sources or they end up having to come up with creative—and a lot of times dangerous—ways to get the buzz they’re looking for.

“Butt chugging” is one of the best, most current examples of people getting f*cked up in a “creative” and really dangerous way.

“A butt chugger is one who consumes alcohol through his or her anus,” The Racket Report explained. “The vessel for this alcohol enema can be a funnel or a soaked tampon.”

The main draw to butt chugging is that it gets people drunk faster and more intensely than regular drinking.

“Because the primary job of the intestines is to absorb nutrients into the body, if you put alcohol directly into your colon, it will be absorbed much more rapidly than it would be if it entered your body orally,” a doctor at Columbia Health said in a Huffington Post article.

“It can make you very drunk, very quickly. Because everyone’s body is different, it’s hard to judge how much or how quickly an alcohol enema would affect any one person.”

Butt chugging can be dangerous not only because of how quickly it gets people drunk, but also because very often the most prevalent butt chuggers are teens who pour cough syrup—not liquor—into their anuses.

As The Racket Report wrote: “Teens who want to experience a different type of ‘High’ are taking this trend to a whole different level” by butt chugging cough syrup.

“It turns out that dextromethorphan (DXM)—a cough suppressant commonly found in over-the-counter cold medicines like Robitussin and Dimetapp—produces an almost hallucinogenic high when chugged in large doses. It can also lead to loss of motor control, dizziness, seizures and hallucinations, among other serious problems.”

Butt chugging, whether it’s liquor or cough syrup, has proven to be incredibly dangerous—even life threatening.

Back in 2004, a woman gave her husband a “sherry enema” that ended up killing him. And that’s not the only time a person has been hospitalized or killed by butt chugging.

“Quicker high—they think it’s going to last longer; it’s more intense,” Dr. Dan Quan told The Huffington Post. “If the person does pass out or lose consciousness, health care professionals won’t necessarily know that they have to look in those areas, and that may delay treatment.”

It seems that the main point in all this is that people are going to get f*cked up one way or another, and as a society, it would make the most sense to give people access to the safest foods, drinks, and drugs possible so they don’t end up scrounging around for some crazy way to get high.

If young people are going to do anything and everything to get the buzz they’re looking for—going so far as to pour cough syrup into their anuses—wouldn’t we want them getting high in the safest way possible?

This is where cannabis comes in.

Cannabis provides the perfect high: it’s natural, it’s impossible to overdose on, and the huge majority of the time the only damage it will cause is to the kitchen, as a stoned teen devours all the ice cream, Cheetos, and leftovers trying to satisfy her munchies.

We’re not necessarily saying that legalizing cannabis will somehow put an end to dangerous ideas like butt chugging cough syrup.

But we are trying to point out that making it difficult for people to access safe forms of recreational drugs contributes to the larger atmosphere in which young people feel forced to dream up all sorts of bizarre ways to get high.

Making recreational cannabis more accessible gives people one less reason to experiment with sketchy drugs and unsafe modes of consumption.

(Photo Credit: twitter.com/freakmommy)