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From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.chem,sci.med
Subject: Re: Butane death
Message-ID: <11891@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 23 Sep 89 14:50:01 GMT
References: <4655@cps3xx.UUCP> <9977@multimax.Encore.COM> <22452@cup.portal.com>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Organization: Dept. of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UCSF
Lines: 34

In article <22452@cup.portal.com> James_J_Kowalczyk@cup.portal.com writes:
>devoz@multimax.UUCP (Joe DeVincentis,EFD TR 75S TR 4S TL> writes:

>>He had stolen a can of PAM cooking spray.  Yup.  No typos.  He said that
>>they take a tube from an empty roll of toilet paper, stuff it with some 
>>toilet paper, then spray the PAM in one end, inhaling from the other.

>>I don't find this humorous in the least.  Who figures these things out?
>>What's in this stuff?

>>devoz

>Someone recently posted to rec.food.cooking that Pam contains alcohol
>(ethanol, I presume).  I have not confirmed this for myself, but it sounds
>plausible.  Snorting Pam?  Move over NyQuil-guzzling...

It's most likely the propellant.  Seems like most any lipophilic molecule
that's a gas at room temp will have some anesthetic effect.   A lot of
spray-can propellants fall into this category.   Who knows who figured
it out in the first place...  but I knew 12 year olds who were doing this
20 years ago.  (these guys were idiots, BTW)   The question "Who figures
these things out" reminds me of something I heard at a lecture on substance
abuse a while back.   Seems that the Vikings used to get ripped by drinking
metabolized lichen juice.  They would gather up a bunch of some kind of
lichen, and steep it in a big pot of boiling water.  The guys would all
stand around and drink the stuff, and when they had to pee, they would do
it right in the pot.  They kept drinking... Apparently the lichen extract
itself had no psychotropic effect, but its metabolite did.  Eventually they
would get sufficiently blasted to go out and pillage or whatever it was they
did.   This talk was a long time ago, and I've forgotten the lecturer's name.
He presented this as truth, although you couldn't prove it by me.  But if
it is true, then I have one question:  Who figured *this* thing out?!

George Seibel, UCSF