And if it’s the same then can someone drink sanitizer (a very small portion) and get drunk?
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It’s not different. They’re generally both ethanol, though some sanitizers might contain isopropyl alcohol instead. Provided that it is ethanol, you could drink hand sanitizer and get drunk. This is a bad idea though because most sanitizers contain a denaturing agent – basically another chemical designed to either make it taste awful or make someone sick who ingests much of it, or both.
Do not ingest hand sanitizer or other alcohol-containing mixtures not intended for human consumption.
Hand sanitizers can legally contain ethyl alcohol (can also be listed as alcohol without additional explanation, also known as ethanol) or isopropyl alcohol (also known as isopropanol).
Ethyl alcohol is the alcohol in whisky, beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages. It is a bad idea to ingest hand sanitizer, but you would get intoxicated by this kind, among other things.
Isopropyl alcohol would also intoxicate, but it is not intended for consumption and it would be very bad for your health. Do not drink isopropyl alcohol.
Methyl alcohol (also known as methanol) is unsafe for use as a hand sanitizer, but things can happen. Ingesting methanol is even worse than isopropyl alcohol. It can also be absorbed through the skin, which makes it dangerous as a hand sanitizer. Avoid methanol completely.
It’s because the type alcohol of alcohol found in cleaning products (isopropyl C3H8O) possesses an extra carbon bond which when consumed will react with chemicals in your body to yield compound that are different (and often more toxic) than the ones yielded by drinking alcohol (ethanol C2H6O).
Also, lab grade ethanol has a small amount of benzene (if I remember right?) to allow the concentration to get above 99%. Every now and then a university student gets the bright idea of watering down lab grade ethanol… only there’s still enough benzene to make a person very ill.
I might have the details mixed up, but the gist is: industrial ethanol often has other stuff in there too. Don’t drink it.
I wonder if there are people who are so addicted to alcohol that they drink hand sanitiser, despite how bad it would taste.
Well, first of all, there’s whole lot of different kinds of alcohols, and only ethanol is somewhat safe for humans (as it’s degraded by ferments in our liver), others can either poison you or cause severe intoxication. Usually, hand sanitizers use either ethanol and/or isopropyl ether, second one is more toxic than first, but somewhat safe in small doses. And first one is usually technical, i.e. it’s actually could be a mixture of mostly ethanol and some fraction of methanol, which is highly toxic. During fermentation, you usually get such mixture and it’s not suitable for food consumption, so it’s distilled, maybe even multiple times, to separate ethanol from methanol. But technical alcohol could be just filtered, so it has relatively high amount of methanol and it’s unsafe for consumption, potentially deadly even.
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