A controversial device that vaporizes alcoholic beverages, allowing the user to inhale alcohol, may be banned in Boston in a Joint Committee Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure hearing at the Statehouse today.
The Alcohol Without Liquid machine, or AWOL, which first debuted in Europe and Asia, vaporizes alcoholic beverages such as whiskey and vodka and evaporates the liquid into a tube, where users breathe in the alcohol, according to the AWOL website.
If the Joint Committee Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure’s legislation fails, Spirit Partners is expected to begin opening bars to try the product in Massachusetts within the next few months, according to the website.
The machine has already been banned in Somerville after Mayor Joe Curtatone expressed concern about the safety of its users.
Curtatone banned the “sniffing of alcoholic beverages” from city bars in restaurants because he said he is concerned with the ease in which a user can get too drunk, according to a January 19 article in the Somerville Journal.
“The purpose is not for people to get to bars and restaurants and get inebriated,” Curtatone said in the article. “There is no place for that in our city or our community.”
The AWOL website also notes that the undesired effects from drinking alcohol, such as hangovers and the high carbohydrate intake, are eliminated, and safety devices on the machine permits users to intake only the equivalent of one shot of alcohol every 20 minutes.
Yet, since no formal scientific tests regarding the machine’s safety have been performed, those who oppose the machines say AWOL cause a faster and more intense buzz because the alcohol moves through a user’s lungs instead of his digestive system, according to Michigan’s WLNS Channel 6 news website.
But Judith Hind of England’s Department of Health Alcohol Policy team said the device, although pricey at about $300 each, has encountered no real safety issues yet.
Hind claimed that there is no current evidence to suggest that using the AWOL machine is anymore dangerous than drinking alcohol in the more traditional way.
Apart from Curtatone’s measure, there has been no other formal government resistance to the AWOL machine in Massachusetts. The rest of the country is a different story. In Michigan, Gov. Jennifer Granholm banned the machine statewide in December.
According to the Spirit Partners website, the North Carolina-based company marketing AWOL from their website, the product’s social use is compared to the use of hookah, a device in which users inhale smoke through a tube.
Spirit Partners have also organized functions, primarily in the southern half of the United States, to spread word about the product.
But for those looking to use AWOL as a method of evading the drinking age, think again. The 21 drinking age applies to AWOL even though it is not technically an alcoholic beverage.