- WASHINGTON (AFP) -- A Greensboro,
North Carolina, company is selling what it calls a "low-calorie, low-carbohydrate
way to consume alcohol" that allows a person to consume spirits and
truthfully say he has not been drinking.
-
- Alcohol Without Liquid - AWOL - is a bulky, costly machine
that vaporizes a mixture of liquor and oxygen and pumps it through a tube
to a hand-held medical-style inhaler which the user puts in his or her
mouth and breaths in a mist of scotch, vodka, or any other type of hard
liquor.
-
- "Alcohol enters the bloodstream through the lungs
rather than the stomach, making AWOL low calorie and low carbohydrate,"
explained Kevin Morse, president of Spirit Partners, Inc., the US manufacturer-distributor.
-
- "The resulting feeling is the same sense of well
being an adult gets from consuming alcohol in the traditional manner, only
milder," he said.
-
- If your intention is to get drunk fast, AWOL will slow
you way down. It takes about 20 minutes to inhale the equivalent of one
shot of alcohol, said company officials.
-
- "It is not something people are going to get very
drunk on," said Morse.
-
- And, the device won't help you beat a drunk driving rap.
-
- "One of the ways alcohol leaves the body is through
the mouth," Morse said. "Therefore, the alcohol will definitely
register on the breathalyzer."
-
- But, when "used responsibly," he added, "there
is no evidence to indicate greater risks from using AWOL than consuming
alcohol in the traditional way."
-
- Consumers "should not drive or operate any type
of machinery after using AWOL," he advises.
-
- And minimum drinking age laws apply.
-
- Morse's company produces the machine on license from
the British patent holder. His target customers are clubs, bars, lounges
- places where people normally go to drink.
-
- The AWOL machine weighs 60 pounds (27 kgs) and costs
$3,000 for the two-user model and $3,700 for the four-user model.
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