I predict that alcohol-infused toothpaste will soon be available at fine retailers everywhere.

An infomercial is a distinct possibility.

The product will be quite light on the fluoride, of course — you’ll need to swallow it to enjoy the effects, and it’s not good for you to swallow a lot of fluoride in one gulp.

(The fluoride concentration is much higher in regular toothpaste — about 1,500 parts per million — than in fluoridated municipal water, typically about 1 ppm. Baker City, by the way, does not add fluoride to its water supply).

I tender this prediction because it seems to me that the alcohol industry has pretty much exhausted the list of liquids that can be boozed up, if you’ll pardon the crudity of the expression.

(I presume infant formula is not an option.)

I reached this conclusion the other night while I was watching TV and a commercial came on that I was pretty sure was a spoof.

But it turns out that Henry’s Hard Sparkling Water is indeed legitimate.

It struck me, after confirming this drink’s validity, that if the booze-sellers have gotten around to adding alcohol to the most basic of all beverages, then surely they will be compelled soon to move into products of a semi-solid nature.

This trend toward making formerly innocent drinks into illicit ones (at least for those younger than 21) dates back some years, to be sure, but it seems to me to have gained considerable momentum over the past decade or so.

When I was going to high school in the ’80s there were basically three categories — beer, wine and liquor.

The proliferation during that decade of the wine cooler — a sort of watered-down Chardonnay, or else a revved-up Kool Aid, depending on your perspective — defined a profound development in the market for relatively low-octane tipples.

But that era seems quaintly simple after you’ve strolled a few of today’s beverage aisles, where the roster of products sold with the clever euphemismistic adjective — “hard” — occupy considerable shelf space.

(This, of course, to distinguish them from the familiar soft drinks, which might attack your enamel but are generally considered benign with regard to your liver.)

Some of these didn’t surprise me when I first noticed the six-packs nudged up against the familiar Bud and Coors.

Hard cider, for instance, isn’t exactly a new concept. I recently read a book about Prohibition and was surprised to learn that one of the major exemptions in the Volstead Act was for the home fermentation of cider.

I was rather more intrigued, though, when I heard about hard iced tea.

I wonder for instance whether the two active ingredients — alcohol, chemically speaking, is a depressant, caffeine a stimulant — are at loggerheads inside those who imbibe, or whether together they produce some sort of synergistic amplifying effect.

The big dollars, though, appear to be in the various hard sodas. The masters of the malted beverage have performed their sorcery on everything from root beer to cola to grape and orange.

It’s as if every sweet elixir that kids pine for now has its slightly alcoholic doppelganger.

Surely the margarita popsicle will soon migrate to the nation’s freezers, tequila conveniently included.

When the ad for Henry’s Sparkling Hard Water interrupted the show I was watching — a documentary on the making of “Caddyshack,” among the great cinematic achievements of the 20th century, in my opinion — I was initially skeptical for the simple reason that I couldn’t imagine why people who desire a drink with a relatively gentle alcoholic nudge wouldn’t be satisfied with the myriad flavors, and styles, already available.

The water industry has long been dissatisfied, of course, with the standard oxygen-hydrogen composition of their product.

Companies have injected carbon dioxide into nature’s simple formula to make the previously plain tingle the tongue and give the nose a brief burning sensation that many people find pleasant.

They have sweetened water with flavors derived from the tree’s fruit as well as the chemist’s beaker. They have tried to enhance the liquid’s already sterling reputation among the medical community by fortifying it, as with white bread or breakfast cereal, with vitamins and minerals.

I find it passing strange that this proliferation of non-traditional alcoholic drinks has roughly paralleled the greatest expansion of beer-making in the U.S. in more than a century.

Pretty much every place with a stoplight boasts a brewery these days — and some places that neither have, nor indeed need, a stoplight.

Mitchell, for instance, has a brewpub.

(Of course Mitchell also has a business loop, something Baker City, notwithstanding its fancy four-lane freeway, can’t claim.)

I can only surmise that a significant percentage of younger drinkers simply don’t care for the bitterness of hops.

It is no revelation, obviously, that some people, though they appreciate certain of alcohol’s effects, would prefer to mask its flavor. The cocktail certainly wasn’t created to accentuate the alcohol part of the formula.

Still and all, I’m a trifle amused by the notion that people would choose water — albeit sparkling, fruit-flavored water, in Henry’s case — as the basis for their intoxicating beverage.

But then it wasn’t so long ago that people by and large slaked their thirst from a faucet rather than a plastic bottle.

I suppose alcoholic water was inevitable.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.