Frances Finnigan, Ph.D.

What’s in your drink?
Throughout the ages alcohol has been people’s preferred drug.  Sadly, is also one of the most dangerous.  All the alcoholic drinks that we enjoy, use and abuse contain ethyl alcohol (chemical formula C2 H5 OH), a member of a large family of alcohols including methyl alcohol (meths) benzene and many of the chemicals in petrol.  Although alcohol, in its commercially chemical form and if drunk sensibly, is not in itself dangerous, these related alcohol compounds are often fatal if drunk.  There is only a thin dividing line between alcohol’s desirable and toxic effects.  For example, when alcohol was prohibited in America, there were many illicit stills which produced alcohol.  Unfortunately, incompetent manufactures made methyl along with ethyl alcohol.  As a result, some drinkers went blind, got brain damage or even died.  Another common related alcohol is ethylene glycol, more commonly used in antifreeze.  This substance is very sweet, sticky and fatal if drunk.  Alcohol itself should always be treated with caution and respect.  All too often we read of deaths of inexperienced drinkers being ‘dared’ by their peers to down a bottle of spirits in a relatively short period of time.

Differences in how we handle alcohol
People’s ability to handle alcohol varies greatly. Following a standard measure there are marked differences between people in absorption time of alcohol into the blood, the amount of alcohol circulating in the blood and the elimination rates of alcohol from the blood.  Thus, the amount of alcohol allowed before driving within the legal limit is not the same for everyone.  In fact, it has been shown that there can be as much as fourteen-fold variation between individuals in how they handle alcohol.  Rather than guess how you handle alcohol, it is wiser not to drink any before driving or engage in the operation of complex dangerous machinery.

The quickest acting drink?
The question may be asked ‘what drink is the quickest-acting to get me drunk?’ The answer in not neat spirits on an empty stomach.  The optimum alcohol concentration for quick absorption into the blood is 10%.  Below this value the concentration is too low for the gut lining to work at its full capacity.  At concentrations above 10% the alcohol has a direct effect on the gut lining, paralysing the absorptive mechanisms, so passage into the blood is slower.  In addition, to get drunk quickly, drinking a few glasses of water or very dilute alcohol before embarking on the ‘real stuff’ will increase the rate of alcohol absorption into the blood.  It also helps if alcohol is drunk warm rather than cold as this enables the gut lining to absorb work more efficiently.

If a certain quantity of absolute alcohol at 5% concentration in the form of, for example, stout, is ingested and compared to ingestion the same amount of alcohol in more concentrated form (e.g. 35% in whisky), the whisky will have a greater and quicker intoxicating effect.  This may well be due to the fact that the time taken to drink a large volume of stout is longer than drinking a smaller volume of whisky (as well as the ‘10% rule’ – see above).  But, when the whisky is diluted to 5% (i.e. creating the same volume of stout versus dilute whisky) the whisky still has the greatest intoxicating effect.  This effect is thought to be due to the presence of other chemicals in stout interfering with absorption.  

Beliefs about alcohol’s effects
People’s beliefs about the effects of alcohol can also play as important a role as the physiological effects in determining how ‘drunk’ a person feels.  For example, violence after drinking occurs in part because people believe violence is acceptable or even expected after drinking.

Alcohol’s effects are different for male and females
The effects of alcohol are more varied in women than in men.  In general, after drinking equal amounts of alcohol, women tend to get ‘more’drunk than men.  This is especially true twice in the menstrual cycle – during the pre-menstrual stage and during ovulation.  Alcohol is more rapidly absorbed into the blood during these two stages and tolerance for alcohol is lowered.   A second reason why women should not try to keep up with their male counterparts’ drinking habits is because women a) tend to weigh less than men and b) have more body fat and, hence, less body water (especially younger women).  This means that a given amount of alcohol has less water to dissolve in and women will have higher alcohol levels. 

Getting rid of alcohol from the body
Alcohol is broken down by special enzymes in the liver into compounds which the body gets rid of.  Contrary to the popular belief that drinking lots of black coffee, will sober you up, coffee has absolutely no beneficial effect on blood alcohol levels, apart from the fact that it will take time to drunk and, thus, give your body more time to eliminate the alcohol from the blood. Also, believing that drinking black coffee sobers you up, may have a further detrimental effect in that the drinker will think or act more sober than he or she actually is and perhaps to something rash like drive a car.  Absolutely nothing sobers a person up except plenty of time. 

Hangover ‘cures’
Once the body has got rid of the alcohol, there is still the prospect of the dreaded hangover.  In general, hangovers are caused partly by dehydration, partly by low blood sugar and partly by congeners.  Generally, the darker the drink the more congeners it contains and the more chance there is of getting a hangover.  Congeners are impurities in beverage alcohol and consist of vitamins, organic and amino acids, mineral, salts, sugars and low concentrations of fusel oils (related to alcohols of a higher molecular size) that can be relatively toxic.  Alcohol is a diuretic and over a night’s drinking more water is eliminated from the body than is absorbed.   It should be stressed that most hangover cures are less than worthless.  Under scientific experimentation, none have been proved to work.  Drinking coffee to avoid or alleviate a hangover only adds to the painful situation.  Like alcohol, coffee is also a diuretic and may well cause further dehydration after a drinking session, worsening the hangover.  Drinking a lot of water before going to bed is probably the best way to avoid some hangover symptoms after a night’s drinking.

Alcohol the depressant
Last but not least, it should never be forgotten that, although alcohol, in the first instance, may make you feel stimulated and cheerful, this stimulant effect is short-lived.  Alcohol is, in fact, a depressant and, like all depressant drugs, can have extremely serious social, psychological and physiological effects.