OMG! WTF?

Nicole had been experimenting for the third time that year with a new method to become intoxicated. She had soaked tampons in vodka and then introduced them into her anus and vagina as though she were having her period, in the usual manner. She claimed her body absorbed the alcohol faster that way than if she had drank it. Soon enough, she lost control and couldn’t even make it back to her bedroom. She did it to avoid having the smell of alcohol on her breath.

“I didn’t want to ruin my minty breath,” she remembered sarcastically about her first time using the method. “I was worried about getting home smelling like beer and mom flipping on me, but I wanted to get a booze, so I did it.”

Both Milagros and her daughter, now 19, prefer to remain anonymous; their names in this article have been changed. They say it would be embarrassing if neighbors and other family members found out about her experiment gone wrong. But while some believe media attention to this problem could serve to promote it, Milagros thinks it’s important that parents become alerted to this unusual way of “drinking.”

One teenage girl, who’d previously described using the tampon method during an interview about her gang affiliation, declined to comment when asked specifically to talk about tampons and vodka. She said it was something she didn’t feel comfortable discussing, although she acknowledged having seen it done at house parties and dance clubs in New York City.

One of Nicole’s friends, La Chula–as she introduced herself and who taught Nicole how to use “drunk tampons”–said the method is very common in Barranquilla, Colombia, her hometown. Oxford University scientific journals first reported this practice of alcohol consumption in the 1990s; by 1999, in the Oxford University Journal, the Medical Council on Alcoholism mentioned this method as “one of the unusual routes of alcohol ingestion that have been reported.”

Although some gynecologists doubt it has achieved the status of a trend–no hard research data exists to support the idea of one–many agree that it can be an efficient way to get drunk fast. “Yes, alcohol and other substances can be absorbed from the thin and vascular mucosa of vagina and rectum,” said Dr. Sorosh Roshan, a Board Certified Obstetrician and Gynecologist who maintained a private practice for more than thirty years in Summit, New Jersey and who is currently President of the International Health Awareness Network.

“It’s also true that the effect is faster than drinking, because the substance immediately enters the circulation by fast absorption into the vascular mucosa, not through stomach and dilution with gastric fluids,” Roshan added.

Although tampons are designed to retain liquids, they’re also used to deliver medications in the vagina, particularly among patients with vaginal infections or patients who may develop cancerous cells in the uterus.

“Tampons, as any other material has only a certain level of absorbency and when that level of absorbency is saturated, the excess substance in it will be released and absorbed by the surrounding tissue,” said Andrea Villegas, a patient being treated by gynecologist Mario Chaparro, in New York City, with tampons soaked in Aldara, a medication used to treat skin cells that can become cancerous, among other illnesses.

The use of tampons soaked in vodka to become intoxicated appears to have been out in the open for at least three years and it has been spreading quickly throughout Europe and the United States.

In the United States, the most notable reference is a popular song released in 2003 called “Band Camp” by Georgia folk singer and song-writer Vic Chesnutt. In the song, Chesnutt details a teenage infatuation , and tells of a girl getting drunk by wearing to school a vodka-soaked tampon: “Once you soaked a tampon in some serious vodka, wore it to school, second period science lab, you feel right off your stool.”

The University of Bristol organized several seminars in 2002 on “Alcohol, Education and Young People.” The topics included young females inserting tampons soaked in alcohol, and young people injecting alcohol. DrugScope, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization working with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, has also begun investigating the matter.

Meanwhile, Nicole continues to struggle with alcohol and life in general. After her mother busted her in the bathroom that night, she called the Alcoholics Anonymous offices in Manhattan, to make her mother feel better; but she never went. She said she hates to put her mother through this, because she doesn’t deserve it. One way or another, Nicole always ends up hanging out with the same people and doing the same things she’s been doing since that day at a house party where her best friend, La Chula, thought her how to use “drunk tampons.”

“I don’t know if I got used to them, messed up myself down there, or if my dependency has grown so big that I feel no pain anymore,” Nicole said. “It does make me feel disgusted with myself though, when I am sober.”

La Chula, on the other hand, said people shouldn’t be so alarmed about it.

“It doesn’t really matter how it gets in,” she said. “Alcohol in your system is alcohol in your system. El fin justifica los medios, which means, the aim justifies the means.”

email: mac2139@columbia.edu

I don’t know if this is true or not but OMG WTF.