A possibly fun thing you’ll never get to do Maine looks to ban Alcohol without Liquid BY SAM PFEIFLE

Remember your friend in third grade who had a nebulizer? Cursed with asthma, he had to spend 20 minutes a day breathing in a fine mist of atomized medication. Well, imagine that same device atomizing 80-proof alcohol and mixing it with pure oxygen. What you get is "Alcohol without Liquid," or what’s coming out of a device being marketed as AWOL — and being targeted by legislators across the country for both regulation and outright banishment.

The thing is, it doesn’t really seem worth banning. Checking out the Web site (www.awolmachine.com) of AWOL’s US distributor, North Carolina’s Spirit Partners, Inc., it turns out that it takes 20 minutes to inhale the equivalent of one shot of alcohol, and that they don’t recommend doing this more than twice in any 24-hour period (exactly why, they don’t say). Not to mention the fact that you’re pretty much limited in what you can be doing during that 20 minutes. If you’re at a bar, using one of the $3000 commercial models, you’re rooted to the spot with another two or three losers, any conversation meaning lost mist, and it’s pretty hard to look cool sucking on a nebulizer.

Do you remember your friend from third grade getting any girls?

If you’re at home, using one of the $300 personal models, it’s not much of a party device: "Dude, I’m going to take a shot! Then you can take one in 20 minutes! Then Sally can take hers while we finish our knitting."

Still, kids are pretty dumb and will try just about anything — chugging Robitussin, inhaling paint and other fumes, sucking the nitrous out of whipped cream cans — so it’s not surprising that someone looking out for the interests of our state’s irrepressible youth, like Representative Mark Bryant (D-Windham/Gray), would rather these machines never find their way to Maine (assuming there aren’t a few already here).

Thus, this session, Bryant introduced An Act to Prohibit the Sale and Use of Vaporized Alcohol and Alcohol Vaporizing Devices, which would levy a fine, and escalating penalties for further offenses, on anyone caught either using vaporized alcohol or possessing a device that does the vaporizing. LD 1155 was voted out of the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee ought to pass on April 27, and it’s likely it will come to a floor vote this week or next.

"I think it’s going to be overwhelmingly passed," says Bryant, whose brother is a sponsor of the bill in the Senate, "and I think with good reason. I see this as a similar bill to the nicotine-water bill last session [banning the sale nicotine-laced water], and I see the Legislature seeing it in that regard also."

But why ban it? The device has produced no horror stories to be found on the Web or elsewhere, and as it’s described it seems pretty innocuous.

"I think it was the kind of concern that if we could stop it before it started it would be a big help," says Bryant. "I think it could be devastating — you don’t really know what else someone might put in that nebulizer. It’s for our youth that we’re trying to stop this."

Well, don’t kids still have to get the booze in the first place, and couldn’t kids just put "what else" into their asthmatic friend’s nebulizer?

Well, this is "connected to an oxygen tank and a generator," Bryant says, "all three of those combined go into your lungs, so it is different, but a nebulizer better articulates how it works . . . You don’t have the ingestion, the warning signs, it just goes straight to your lungs, to your bloodstream, to your brain."

While AWOL’s distributors tout the benefits of not having to ingest the calories of liquid alcohol because the alcohol is absorbed into your bloodstream through the lungs, Bryant is concerned that this will shortcut the normal warning signs someone uses to tell themselves they’ve had too much to drink. Also, he’s concerned that, without the digestive system to intervene, the alcohol will hit a user harder.

Has he tried it for himself?

"I have not tried it," he says. "But just common sense says that if you have a half-ounce of alcohol, if you mix that all straight to your lungs, you’re getting a bigger shot."

Bill Sasser, an owner of Spirit Partners, Inc., begs to differ with Bryant’s "common sense."

Ask him if AWOL is more dangerous than normal alcohol ingestion and he says, "No, obviously it’s not, and they haven’t tested it to see if it is, either. I’m sure no doctors [in Maine] have tested it to say that it is."