Two to four drinks per day is NOT addiction
Alcoholic Myth-of-the-Month: How much is too much?
“Researchers considered any man who averaged more than two drinks per day or more than four drinks per occasion to be an excessive drinker. For women it was more than one drink per day or more than three drinks per occasion.”
So said The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a recent study, estimating that 35,000 people in 2001 died from disease linked to drinking too much alcohol. They concluded that “these results emphasize the importance of adopting effective strategies to reduce excessive drinking…”
Studies such as these not only create confusion in the mind of the non-alcoholic, but also cause the uninitiated to take their eye off the ball. By the time physical diseases secondary to drinking surface, years of excessive drinking have occurred. Further, such drinking cannot be “reduced,” since consumption that damages one’s own body is, by definition, alcoholic in nature and no alcoholic can successfully “reduce” drinking for an indefinite period. Strategies must be found that stop the drinking, not reduce it, which is at best a temporary fix.
While three drinks in quick succession for a 120-pound person and four for a 200-pounder will make someone legally drunk for purposes of operating a motor vehicle, it will not if the drinking occurs over the course of more than two hours. Recall from my books that each drink increases the BAL by .02 per cent for the 200-pound person and .03 per cent for the 120-pounder, while the body assimilates alcohol at an average rate of .015 per cent per hour. The BAL increases to less than .08 per cent if the drinking occurs over two hours, only .02 to .03 per cent if drunk over four hours and remains at near zero if drunk over a period of over five hours. Since most think of several hours as an “occasion,” this clearly obfuscates the issue.
To suggest that someone having more than one or two drinks per day is drinking “excessively” only confuses those trying to distinguish truly addictive drinking from non-addictive use. A 200-pound person can drink two bottles of Bordeaux (the equivalent of 12 shots of 80-proof liquor) over the course of 12 hours, only to see his BAL rise to .06 per cent. A 120-pound woman can drink one bottle over 12 hours and maintain a BAL of near-zero. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might be more successful in its mission if it didn’t promote ideas that would make us think every French person must be alcoholic.