tollbooth

I have a technical question regarding alcohol consumption. Is there a relationship between the amount of alcohol an alcoholic needs to drink to become intoxicated in the later stages, compared to regular social drinkers? Specifically, do long-term A's need to drink less amounts of alcohol to get drunk, as their disease progresses?

Reason I ask is a because a recent acquaintence I met didnt seem to be drinking alot of beer, but he became very drunk. It is known that he is an alcoholic. I had assumed that tolerance would cause the body to require more and more volume of alcohol to get drunk over the years?

I had noticed this similar effect in my XAGF. But online reading showed to me that females react to alcohol more then males do, due to their higher body-fat content/lower water content, as well as not having a specific enzyme present in their stomachs which men do, that aids in digesting alcohol. So I assumed that answered why she got so drunk on such a small quantity of wine. Now I meet this male who got just as drunk, on a relatively small amount of beer.

LaTeeDa

The book "Under the Infuence" answers this question and many more. Late stage alcoholics need less to become intoxicated as their body loses it's defenses against the alcohol.

But, many people on here will also tell you that they really had no idea how much the person was consuming because most of it was consumed in secret.

L

good_luck

Yes. My understanding is that in the late stages of alcoholism, tolerance decreases.

mike_mass

I've heard people at meetings claim both heightened and diminished tolerance by the time they reached the later stages. In my case, I needed more to get drunk.

Astro

I've heard so many people share, by what I understand it can be different for everyone.

In the later stages, and my experience was the same, it was taking less for the desired effect but it also seemed like there was never enough. I also became much less discriminating, it didn't matter what I was drinking as long as I was losing touch with reality.

best

Lets see...

Two beers before leaving the house. Opps...we are running late, may as well have a couple more so I don't show up sober while everyone else has already had a few. We all need be on the same page ya know.
Can't forget the one for the road.
Ok five beers down as I reach the party. Now how many do you see me drink before I look drunk?

Yup I am a 3 beer drunk.

Things are not always as they seem. What others see and what I did were not always the same.

DesertEyes

Technically, if you grab a liver and stick in a pot at some laboratory you get the "drop off" effect. Over the time the liver "learns" how to process alcohol, and therefore can handle ever increasing amounts of it. However, at the same time, liver cells are being killed by the alcohol. The more alcohol, the more cells die. Somewhere down the road there's a point where so many cells die that the liver's ability suddenly "drops off" to almost nothing. There's just not enough cells left to handle _any_ alcohol, no matter how powerful those few cells may be.

In real life, you don't find livers in pots. The human body is much more complicated and all kinds of other issues become involved. How much food is in the stomach, how much sugar in the bloodstream, how well the pancreas can handle the sugar, how much fatty tissues, how much blockage in the arteries, and on and on.

In the end, only the embalmer cares how much alcohol is in the body. What matters to the rest of us is the _behavior_ of the person. Once the car is in the tree, and the pedestrians are dead in the gutter, the amount of alcohol in the wine, how long ago it was drunk, how much other booze was drank in secret, it all becomes irrelevant. Some people can _not_ drink _at all_.

Being a codie, I am allergic to their drinking as much as they are. I allow alcohol to destroy my life, and I don't even have to drink it for that to happen.

Mike

NOMOMERLOTMAMMA

Towards the very end for me, after a few months of having to drink a lot of alcohol to achieve drunkenness, I found that I would get drunk on just a few glasses of wine...one of the signs for me that my alcoholism was at a dangerous stage..

wraybear

My AH would have a bottle hiding in the car, in his coat, in the garage, in the basement and would be intoxicated before we got to where we were going. So, he would appear to not have a lot to drink.

But in the later stages where he was drinking morning, noon and night, it was hard to tell becuase he was drunk all the time.

Janitw

My teenage son noticed that my XAH's tolerance was alot lower about the time he left us. Back in the day...he needed a good 12 pack to be drunk...later on it was only 3 beers and he was trashed.....I think that would be stage four. The liver becomes fatty and just can not handle the larger amounts of alcohol anymore.