Alcohol Haze
...lleges and some of the effects it has on the drinker and those around them. First let’s talk about the actual definition of binge drinking. That is when a person’s only goal is to get drunk and get there as fast as possible while consuming five or more drinks in a row. And now for when it may start, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism binge drinking can start as early as 13 years old and tends to increase throughout the adolescent years peaking in young adulthood 18-20 years old. 8 % of youths aged 12-17 and 30 % of aged 18-20 meet the criteria of being labeled a binge drinker. About 10.4 million adolescents aged 12-20 reported using alcohol according to a recent survey put out by the Harvard School of Public Health and of those 5.1 million were occasional binge drinkers and 2.3 million heavy drinkers who binge at least 5 times a month. Binge drinking is almost twice as common in males as it in females, 8 % and 5 % respectively. So as you can see it is far more common in our peers than one may think. Now lets see how common it is today on our campuses through out our nation. According to a 2001 national survey nearly half of all college students surveyed drank 4 or more drinks on an average night. According to that survey 39 % of college women and 50 % of college men admitted to binge drinking. Students who live in a fraternity or sorority house are the heaviest drinkers 86 % of fraternity residents and 80 percent of sorority residents admitted to binge drinking on a regular basis. I also read that the annual beer consumption of college students is just short of 4 billion cans of beer. Just to give you an idea how much that really is imagine taking all of those cans and stacking them end to end that stack would reach the moon and go 70 thousand miles beyond it! So as I mentioned college student sure do there fair share of drinking. And now to the consequences, there are two types, direct, being to the drinker themselves and indirect, which involves others around him or her. I’ll start with the direct consequences. Alcohol poisoning, a severe and potentially fatal reaction do an alcohol overdose—it is the most severe consequence of binge drinking. When excessive amounts of alcohol are consumed, the brain is deprived of oxygen. The struggle to deal with an overdose of alcohol and a lack of oxygen will eventually cause the brain to shut down the voluntary functions that regulate breathing and the heart rate. If a person is known to have consumed large quantities of alcohol in a short period of time, symptoms of alcohol poisoning include: ----Vomiting ----Unconsciousness ----Cold, Clammy, Pale or Bluish skin ----Slow or irregular breathing, often less than 8 breaths a minute If this condition is caught early there is one procedure to keep the body from absorbing any more of the already consumed alcohol, pumping of the stomach. When this is done a small hose is forced down the throat and then hooked to a small pump in which the remaining alcohol in the stomach is removed. As I mentioned earlier about 14 hundred students d...