If the current state of things has you feeling overwhelmed (which, totally understandable), you might be thinking to yourself, “Man, I wish I had a contraption that could torpedo both booze and weed smoke into my exhausted body at the exact same time.” Lucky for you, beer/weed bongs already exist, and they pledge to make you royally fooked — in a good way.
“The Knockout lets you chug a beer and smoke weed back-to-back,” says founder and inventor Alex Mullen. “When you chug a beer, there’s a slight vacuum created in the bottle. We added a metal straw that would relieve the pressure from that vacuum and also suck smoke in at the same time. So, when you put the Knockout on a beer with a packed bowl and flip it upside down, all this stuff happens at once. You have to light the bowl so that the smoke gets sucked into the bottle, all while chugging as fast as you can. It’s not easy, but I’ve seen quite a few people pull it off the first time they try.”
From his own experience, Mullen says combining beer and weed in a single bong results in a better buzz and high than consuming each on their own. Indeed, being crossfaded is a real thing, and consuming alcohol at high rates of speed does increase your drunkenness. “In my opinion, yes, using the Knockout for sure increases the effects of combining beer and weed,” he says. “The main reason is speed: You down an entire beer, then smoke a bowl in the time it usually takes you to tie your shoes. There’s something special that happens when you take on that challenge. It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush.”
From a scientific standpoint, however, while speed does matter, combining booze and weed smoke in the same chamber should have no real impact on their combined potency — so long as you consume all of the booze and all of the smoke. “The active ingredients in marijuana aren’t soluble in water, but they’re somewhat soluble in alcohol,” says Gary Wenk, cannabis researcher and professor of neuroscience at Ohio State University. “Thus, some of the THC and CBD will be removed from the smoke and remain in the alcohol. If a person drinks all of the beer, then they’ll get the same amount of THC and CBD, and the effects won’t differ from just drinking the beer and smoking a joint. So, in general, the beer will tend to reduce the marijuana high, unless you consume all of the beer.”
“I had one student who put beer in a hookah and smoked marijuana through it,” Wenk continues. “That’s a bad idea, because the alcohol will remove most of the THC and CBD. It then becomes necessary to drink the hookah water — not fun.
In other words, you could theoretically chug a beer, then quickly rip a separate bong to achieve the same results as you get from a combined beer/weed bong. However, as Mullen mentioned, it would be unfair to discount the impact of the adrenaline boost that can come along with challenging yourself to get both booze and weed down the hatch in a single chug/inhale. In a party environment, a dose of adrenaline can make you feel supercharged, which could explain why some people feel extra twisted after conquering a beer/weed bong.
So, if you do indeed feel inclined to rocket booze and weed into your system using one of these devices, it will get you pleasantly and swifty blitzed. Alternatively, you could just chug a beer, then quickly toke a joint. Either way, you need not limit yourself to beer, either. “I’ve seen quite a few Smirnoff Ices,” Mullen says. “One guy I know only does Knockouts with Twisted Teas. Personally, beer is my go-to, but I also really like ciders for doing Knockouts. They have less bubbles so you can chug them faster.”
Cider, huh? You heard it here first.
Ian Lecklitner
Ian Lecklitner is a staff writer at MEL Magazine. He mostly writes about everyone's favorite things: Sex, drugs and food.
