04.24.12
The Listerine Lush refuses to die!
A flurry of mildly amusing stories shows how teenagers have found the new Listerine and Nyquil — Purell. Purell lacks the absolute convenience of old Listerine but separation of the glycerin and ethanol, just add salt and filter, yields a much bigger kick. Kids, kids, just bribe some local adult into buying you a couple bottles of Thunderbird or Night Train. The latter don’t have that bit of rubbing alchohol in them.
When I lived in Allentown on Cumberland Street the local newspaper would occasionally run stories on Allen High teenagers, not a lot, just enough I imagine, charging into the local pharmacy for OTC drinks containing smallish fractions of ethyl alcohol. With Listerine, they had to develop a taste, or stomach, for phenol.
Now it’s Purell, the desperate but enterprising kid’s social lubricant of choice.
From eHow — another of the new compendia of all wisdoms , before it gets yanked:
1. Combine 4 oz. of hand sanitizer gel with 1 tsp. of table salt.
2. Cover a cup or bowl with several layers of cheesecloth or a similar porous material.
3. Strain the mixture through the cheesecloth. The liquid ethyl alcohol will pass through, leaving the congealed salt and glycerin behind. In one experiment, the filtered liquid that resulted from this process was 70 percent ethyl alcohol and 2 percent isopropyl alcohol by volume.