Jake Young is a 
Yes! Dutch students have found a loophole that they argue should allow alcohol to be sold to minors:
Dutch students have invented powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gram packets that cost €1-1.5 ($1.35-$2).
Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
"We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks," 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.
Van Elderen and four classmates at Helicon Vocational Institute, about an hour's drive from Amsterdam, came up with the idea as part of their final-year project.
"Because the alcohol is not in liquid form, we can sell it to people below 16," said project member Martyn van Nierop.
Just leave it to students to -- like the astronauts on the Apollo missions -- boldly go where no seller of booze has gone before.
I kind of want to know what it looks like though. They make it sound like its Pop Rocks.
Comments
Any guess as to the chemistry? It would have to be another compound that decomposes into alcohol. Diethyl pyrocarbonate (DEPC) does that---releasing CO2, which would explain the fizz---but it's too toxic to be selling to teenagers in little packets.
(On the other hand: is this really being sold? Or does it exist only in the PowerPoint presentations of a bunch of overimaginative MBA students? )
Posted by: BM | June 6, 2007 1:37 PM
Why would it not be illegal to sell minors alcohol in powdered form? I can't imagine Dutch courts would interpret the alcohol statute so narrowly, if in fact it is liquid-specific.
Posted by: michael | June 8, 2007 6:27 PM
Actually, it seems to work via the process of getting the alcohol molecule to bind with a sugar molecule, and then when the mixture has water added to it, the alcohol is released.
The invention of powdered alcohol is not new... has been around for since the 1980s, and there has been a version of powdered alcohol being sold in Germany for a few years now.
I wrote a bit about it here a couple of days ago.
Posted by: JilInPattaya | June 9, 2007 8:10 AM
They're crossing the border from being bright guys who invented something funny (and possibly useful) to drug peddlers. I don't like it.
Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | June 9, 2007 11:54 AM
well with the drug testing in USA schools using ETG they may get screwed as well as many others ,more posts will come your way on this test....
Posted by: lilibit | June 9, 2007 9:04 PM