Attention, Butt-Chuggers: Please Do Not Put Alcohol Up Your Butt [Updated]

No, really, don’t. Don’t put alcoholic beverages up your butt. It’s a shame that the state of campus binge drinking — which once upon a time was just a fine, longstanding tradition of respectable keg stands and historically significant beer bongs — has come to a point where this even needs to be clarified, but here we are, clarifying it. Don’t put alcohol in your butt. And at the risk of sounding all “kids these days grumble grumble,” KIDS THESE DAYS. Specifically, the kids these days who are engaging in a charming practice called “butt chugging.”

Personally, I’d not heard of butt chugging until this morning (and what delightful new words with which to start my day), but if the phrase itself isn’t quite self-explanatory enough, it’s basically an alcohol enema, wherein a rubber tube is inserted into some young scholar’s asshole and drinks are then poured down the tube. (Pro tip: Try attaching the other end of tube to an ice luge! No. Don’t do that. You already did, didn’t you?)

Butt chugging is a hot topic today thanks to the clever folks at the University of Tennessee, which has a “dry campus” (oh, charades). Alex Broughton, a 20-year-old student, was taken to the UT hospital in the wee hours of Saturday morning; he had alcohol poisoning and was unresponsive, with a blood alcohol content thought to be more than .40 percent, five times the legal limit. After a Q&A with the people who dragged Broughton to the emergency room, it was determined that the young man had been, yes, butt chugging. They had been doing so at the Pi Kappa Alpha house, so officers went over there to investigate. They found “beer cans, alcohol paraphernalia, and a plastic bottle that appeared to be from the interior of a wine box,” plus several “subjects” passed out with bags from wine boxes strewn all over the place. [Update: But, as one commenter points out, the reports do not say that the cops founding any tubing, which would be necessary. HM.] Were they butt chugging Franzia? White Zinfadel, I hope.

Broughton wasn’t a pledge or a new student, and presumably this wasn’t a hazing incident. This was just for kicks. He’s since recovered and the frat has been suspended for 30 days; in the aftermath we are left with unpleasant mental images and blog posts that I never thought I’d be writing.

Whyyyyyy would you funnel alcohol up your ass? Because consuming alcohol rectally — gah, those words really make a butthole clench — gets you very drunk, duh:

“The abundance of capillaries and blood vessels [in the rectum] greatly heightens the level and speed of the alcohol entering the blood stream as it bypasses the filtering by the liver,” Police spokesman Darrell DeBusk said in a statement Monday.

Then Mr. DeBusk burst into tears, wondering what had become of this world and these kids and his life and ohgodnothingmattersanymore.

To be fair, butt chugging (the more you say it, the funnier it gets, even if the outcome is decidedly not hilarious) is not unique to University of Tennessee; in 2004, a Texas man died after his wife administered a sherry enema. And kids have already found other clever ways to insert alcohol into their bodies so as to get realllllly drunk, realllllly quick. We’ve heard about vodka tampons, sure, but Kim Pouncey, president of Straight Up LLC, an organization that combats alcohol abuse, says there’s more:

“There’s a trend now of pouring alcohol directly into their eyes,” Pouncey said. The alcohol is administered with an eye dropper.

YOU GUYS. CHILL OUT. If what you really want is to get blackout drunk, I promise you can do that just by drinking. Just put the alcohol in your mouth and swallow it. Eye droppers, tampons, enemas — all this extra stuff is just unnecessary and a little bit scary (and that’s to say nothing of blacking out which is, you know, not a good thing).

Listen, kids: You can put all sorts of things up your butt. You’re young and you’ve got youthful butts brimming with enthusiasm, ready and waiting to take in all kinds of stuff, from fingers and peens to matchbox cars and your lucky rabbit paw. But you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Take it slow.

Update: Broughton’s father says no butt chugging occurred. Rather, Broughton was participating in Pi Kappa Alpha’s TOUR OF FRANZIA party, which is…way better? Whether or not butt chugging occurred in this instance probably doesn’t even matter anymore (except for Broughton’s web history): a quick search on Google News makes it clear that the media have taken off running with this one. Butt chugging is part of the national conversation. Enjoy it while it lasts, and say “butt chugging” as much as possible. Butt chugging. Butt chugging.