D.I.Y.

Photo by the author

Parties are only fun when you’re drunk. It’s sad but true. Everyone basically turns into your worst nightmare but that’s ok because so do you. When you’re sober, the annoying habits of drunk people are magnified tenfold and you find yourself hating everything you had ever held close. It used to be that if you didn’t feel like drinking you were pretty well screwed. That was until someone came up with a no-fail solution that takes all the hard work out of getting shit-faced: a vapouriser which essentially I.Vs pure alcohol straight to your brain. The mechanics of the AWOL (Alcohol Without Liquid) are fairly simple. A shot of alcohol is poured into a diffuser capsule which is connected to a pipe. Oxygen bubbles are then pumped through the booze-bong, absorbing the alcohol and creating a vapour that you suck through a tube. Wait 10 seconds and voila, you’re wasted! Promoters claim the product gets you drunk ten times faster than drinking. The machine promises a “hangover, calorie and carb free way to enjoy alcohol”. It sounds futuristic and way too good to be true right? Maybe that’s why the party police (aka the Federal Government) reacted by banning it in Australia not long after its introduction. Or maybe it is because inhaling alcohol can result in rapid intoxication, increase the risk of damage to the brain and can lead to dementia in the long term? Whatever. So most people have never even been able to try what is essentially the perfect solution to every party woe, but I spoke to a couple that did—Sydneysiders Matt and Andrew. They were so bummed about not having access to it that they took it upon themselves to make one of their own. VICE: Right, so take us through the design process involved here. Matt and Andrew: We just put the alcohol in my asthma nebuliser and it turns the alcohol into a vapour which we inhale. Then I don’t remember. How drunk does it get you and how fast? Well the first time we used it we put in Bacardi 151 and that fucked us up pretty quickly. One minute you’re totally cool and the next minute you’re watching yourself dance across the living room. It’s like an out of body experience. One time Matt kept dancing straight through a plate glass door, which was hilarious until he ended up in the emergency room getting thousands of stitches. So what’s better—alcohol with or without liquid? We prefer conventional drinking when we’re sitting around at a BBQ or something. It’s an occasional thing you know? I mean you don’t wanna overdo it.