Newspaper Article - Intoxication Levels

Can you handle it?

Written by: Mike
North America

Men and female are both affected by each drink they consume. Alcohol is distributed carelessly around the world every day and what people don’t realize is how little it takes to become intoxicated. Alcohol affects your body based on your weight and gender before your drinking experience, as opposed to what most people have been led to believe.

One of the most dramatic things affected by our consumption of alcohol is our motor skills. Every drink we take slightly impairs our ability to make proper decisions. For some people it takes a lot less to get drunk and for this to happen, these people in urban terms are known as “light weights”.

The term light weight is actually as close a proper term as you could get when it comes to being drunk. Our weight plays the biggest factor in our intoxication tolerance levels. Did you know that if a man who weighs 100 pounds drinks 24 oz. of beer his alcohol level is already at 0.08% blood to alcohol, the legal limit! But if a man of 240 pounds were to drink the same amount he would only be at 0.03%.

Gender plays a huge factor in our tolerance levels as well. For example if that the man who drank 24 oz. of beer at 100 pounds was actually a woman of 100 pounds she would already be at 0.10%. For a woman to have 24 oz. of beer and not be past the legal limit she would need to be at least 140 pounds.

Now we always hear about people saying “Oh he drinks all the time, he doesn’t get drunk anymore!” But the truth is that though if you do drink more than casually you will become more tolerant of it, the difference is not nearly as drastic as a change in weight or the differences between genders.

A little fact that should be known is that for every 40 minutes of drinking you lose 0.01% of the alcohol in you blood system. So if you check up on the charts and realize you have had too much to drink and get behind the wheel try applying that rule and remember that the only real thing that can sober you up is time!

Statistics taken from:
http://www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm (this site is awesome, should definitely give it a read)