The Worst Thing I Ever Drank

Once upon a time, someone who I thought didn't hate me gave me this awful shit called Cisco. At the time, I didn't know how awful it was going to be, I just thought it was some cheap-ass convenience store wine cooler thing. The after effects, however, were very near to attempted murder.

Anyway, this person gave me this shit, and I had to take someone to a medical procedure the next morning so what the hell? Maybe this stuff will help me get to sleep. After all, it was only 12 ounces, the equivalent of two glasses of wine, so that shouldn't be a problem for me since I've polished off whole bottles of wine before. No big deal. So I forced down the whole thing, as awful tasting as it was and went to bed. I awakened a couple hours later having to pee like crazy except my body felt like it was half paralyzed. It was like the feeling you get when you sleep on your arm and it feels all heavy and you can't move it--except this was the feeling I had over my whole body.

I don't know how I managed to get to the bathroom. I guess I crawled/dragged myself there and I don't know how I managed to use the toilet. All I remember was lying on the floor feeling like I was going to puke or die. I didn't do either. I managed to crawl back to bed and get back to sleep. The next morning and all through the next day my head felt like it was swimming and I felt like I had been drugged.

Fast forward a couple years when I was visiting an old friend from school. The subject of the worst thing you ever drank came up and I mentioned my experience with this Cisco shit. My friend's husband knew exactly what I was talking about and had mentioned that it was rumored that there was more than just alcohol in Cisco. Being curious about it, I did a web search and found this article.

Now isn't this interesting:

Four years ago, a New York-based wine company met with U.S. Federal Trade Commission officials, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Surgeon General. The subject was a fortified wine called Cisco that was posing serious health risks--particularly to teens.

And:

"We called it the 'wine fooler,'" recalls former U.S. Surgeon General Antonia Novello. "It is more like a drug than a drink. It was really frightening, because they had packaged it to look very refreshing. Cool and refreshing and like a wine cooler."

Cisco's kick-- more powerful than fortified wines like Thunderbird--sometimes affected drinkers so adversely that they complained to authorities, fearing the effects were the result of product tampering.

That was exactly what I thought. Surely I was slipped a roofie(Rohypnol). And then:

Several health advocacy groups called for Canandaigua to stop selling the wine when several drinkers developed acute alcohol poisoning after drinking Cisco.
...a 100-pound person who drank a 375 ml (12 oz.) bottle of Cisco in less than an hour could die of alcohol poisoning; a 150-pound person would be legally drunk.

Go read the whole thing. Isn't that just beautiful? I was around 115 pounds at the time. I could have died of alcohol poisoning and the asshole who gave it to me thought it would be some kind of hilarious joke to do that. And the asshole also had the nerve to tell me that he told someone else that he gave that shit to me and their response was, "What the fuck, man? Are you trying to kill her?"

Yeah. I guess actually killing me would have been the most hilarious joke.