EDITORIAL- Too lazy to drink? Try inhaling booze

Like alcohol, but hate all that drinking involved?

A new machine, already popular in London… Like alcohol, but hate all that drinking involved?

A new machine, already popular in London — which delivers alcohol straight to the bloodstream by the user’s inhaling of a mixture of alcohol and pressurized oxygen — has crossed the Atlantic and is now available in lounges in New York City.

And, the New York State legislature, in a thoroughly Puritanical move, wants to ban the Alcohol Without Liquid machine — the Anti-Breathalyzer as we like to call it.

Alcohol Without Liquid promises a hangover-free intoxication. We’ll believe it when we try it — and please, please can we try it?

Superficially, it functions slightly differently than traditional drinking, with alcohol absorbed by the lungs’ lining, rather than the stomach’s lining, delivering the ultimate in low-carbohydrate drinking. Alcohol without the calories or pesky beer gut? We’ll take it.

All this seems to be too much to handle for the upstanding N.Y. legislators. According to an Ithaca Journal article, Sen. Pat McGee, R-Franklinville, thinks this will encourage underage drinking (or breathing) and drunk driving.

Yet the machine doesn’t interfere with carding policies, and its affect on Breathalyzers, if any, should be tested rather than assumed.

Plus, these legislators are forgetting that United States already decided that alcohol — although as dangerous as some illegal drugs — is legal. That doesn’t mean alcohol can’t be regulated, but to outright ban an untested new delivery system isn’t in keeping with alcohol’s legalization.

And the N.Y. legislature needs to start thinking with its wallet. There’s money to be made on this new system, in the form of taxes and licensing for Alcohol Without Liquid.

Test it and regulate it, of course. That’s what the Food and Drug Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are for.

But to outright ban something without proof that it’s more harmful than Barcardi 151 — which any experienced drinker knows can be pretty powerful stuff — is absurd.

And they won’t be hurting for test subjects. Even in this uncultured ‘Burgh we have more than 30,000 potential testers ready to go. We like to call them college undergrads, and, yeah, we’d like some alcohol with our beer.