By Margaux Poupard
Partying like an astronaut just got one step closer to becoming reality. On Tuesday, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved (again) four varieties of Palcohol, the powdered alcohol The Bold Italic told you about last year.
What’s changed in a year? Well, whatever issues the Bureau previously had with labeling have been “resolved,” and pending the FDA’s determination that Palcohol is unadulterated, you could see powdered alcohol at BevMo as early as this summer.
To refresh your memory, Palcohol stirred up (see what I did there?!) controversy last year when the parent company, Lipsmark LLC, lobbied for federal approval, causing some lawmakers to go full-on Nancy Grace. Concerns over powdered alcohol covered all the bases you’d expect: underage abuse! The ease of spiking a stranger’s drink! The ease of sneaking it into public events! (Because apparently none of that currently happens with liquid alcohol). Several states quickly moved to ban powdered alcohol, including smoke-it-if-you’ve-got-it Colorado, but the law has since morphed to ensure that powdered alcohol is regulated as if it were a liquid.
Should the rest of the process go smoothly, Palcohol will come in a 4x6 pouch, with the first run of flavors mimicking cosmopolitans, margaritas, vodka, rum, and (possibly) lemon drops. Production, distribution, and pricing is still TBD, but founder Mark Phillips is already taking haters to task. If you want to bring up that thing about how people can snort Palcohol, the company’s website helpfully points out that we can also snort black pepper if we so choose. It’s a bold statement from a guy who came up with the idea of powdered alcohol because he didn’t want to lug a liter of Carlo Rossi on a hike (true story).
Jokes aside, no one can stop an idiot from Hoovering this shit up his nose if he wants to, which is why we can’t have nice things. Until then, though, it looks like getting wasted at outdoor concerts just got a lot easier.
h/t Huffington Post; photo courtesy of ThinkStock
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