TORONTO

A man — appearing to be in his early 20s and wearing a backwards baseball cap — pours a Budweiser into an empty plastic bottle while sitting on the couch.

Next to the bottle is a blue-coloured bicycle pump with its needle piercing a cork at the end.

He describes himself as “L.A. Beast,” and on the video he’s uploaded on YouTube — “Dude Gets Drunk Without Drinking 1 Drop of Alcohol” — he shows viewers how to vapourize booze.

“I’ve been trying to lose weight,” he explains to the camera. “I’ve been trying to keep the calorie intake low, but at the same time, I want to go out on the weekends and get s---housed.”

This emerging trend of “smoking alcohol” — or Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) — is becoming more popular among university and college students who say a quick hit of liquor is more intense than slowly sipping a few beers during a night out.

But a Toronto drug awareness organization is concerned the concentrated vapours could rapidly increase the risk of alcohol poisoning.

“The main concern is because it’s new, there’s no research to show you how much is too much,” said Seth Fletcher, manager of programs for Council on Drug Abuse.

“You can do it so fast and it’s just bypassing your body’s natural elimination functions to say, ‘We’ve had too much alcohol.’ Your body’s natural fight is to throw up to reduce alcohol poisoning. There isn’t that check and balance when you’re inhaling it.”

When a person consumes alcohol, the toxins are absorbed in the stomach and intestines, then metabolized in the liver. When the alcohol transforms into vapour and is inhaled, the fumes go straight to the lungs, brain and bloodstream and the effects are felt almost immediately.

In other words — you could get drunk really fast without even knowing it.

There are several ways to vapourize alcohol including putting the liquid over dry ice and inhaling the fumes that way. The most common method for university and college students tends to be using a plastic bottle and filling it with their preferred choice of booze. Then, they cork the bottle, insert a needle attached to a bicycle pump and pump the bottle full of air. The oxygen gets infused into the alcohol, and they will pop the cork off and suck up the vapours that way.

“It seems like the effect is if you have one drink — whether you inhale it or swallow — has the same intoxicating effects,” Fletcher said. “It will show up on a blood test. But it’s a lot quicker.”

And apparently, there is no hangover.

AWOL has been popular in the U.K. with vapourizing machines popping up at local bars, some dubbing them the “modern day hookah.”

Fletcher said this method to get loaded is appealing to the 18 to 25 age group because they’re willing to experiment with new ways to consume alcohol.

“Secondly, there’s a demographic that is using it because you’re not getting the same calories when you inhale alcohol. I think it’s been called, ‘drunkorexia,’” he said. “This is really starting to stick and really starting to get some traction in especially college kids, there seems to be that frat boy mentality associated with it.”

Toronto Emergency Medical Services said while they haven’t seen a prevalence of alcohol poisoning from vapours, they are concerned if it is a rising trend.

“Definitely, we would want to build the awareness of this practice, that we don’t endorse it,” said EMS spokesman Kim McKinnon. “We would want to urge people to call 911 if they need us. We see these types of effects from abuse of alcohol and other substances regularly in our practice.”

Toronto Police could not be reached for comment about whether it has concerns of smoking alcohol bypassing breathalyzer tests.

Meanwhile, both Toronto Public Health said smoking alcohol hasn’t been an issue their harm reduction clinic has seen or heard of across the city. The same goes for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Smoking alcohol surfaced around 2004 in the U.S. in post-secondary institutions, but there hasn’t been much research done since. Fletcher said as the prevalence grows, it may be necessary to gather more data and statistics surrounding it.

“I wouldn’t say it’s mainstream,” Fletcher said. “Within the past 18 months, it’s really started to spike and it is gaining popularity.”

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The Vaportini is about to make its Canadian debut.

A Chicago-based entrepreneur is bringing her product, which she champions as a “revolutionary new way of consuming alcohol,” to Toronto this summer. The Vaportini is a glass sphere that sits atop a metal ring glass over a standard glass. The heat from a lit candle raises the temperature of the alcohol and after five minutes, there is enough vapour you can suck up through the glass straw in the sphere.

“We have had so many orders from Canada, so that’s why we’re going to do a marketing push for more bars (to purchase),” said Julie Palmer, who created the product. “The calorie thing is a really big deal — and no impurities.”

She said since she launched the product in January, her client base — ages 21 to 45 — has grown to tens of thousands worldwide who have purchased the $30 kit. Liquors with a 70+ proof are recommended for use.

Palmer dismisses concerns of alcohol poisoning when spirits are inhaled, citing you feel the effects immediately. A sip from the Vaportini straw is equivalent to a sip of a drink.

“You can’t get totally drunk on this because the effects also wear off right away,” she said. “It varies depending on person to person. We have had experts state that it’s a lot safer because it doesn’t go through the digestive system and esophagus, which can be really irritated by alcohol.”

Within 15 minutes, the alcohol in one drink is usually metabolized, Palmer said.

“It would take 20 minutes to do a full shot using Vaportini, and that would be if you’re inhaling aggressively,” she said. “With Vaportini, you feel the effects right away I don’t see any way you would get alcohol poisoning because it goes right into your bloodstream and evaporates in a certain volume (so) you can’t breathe in an entire shot.”