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The effects of alcohol vary from person to person and from time to time.

Alcohol has a depressant effect on the central nervous system, which includes the brain and nerve pathways that control muscle action. It slows down brain functions and can affect judgment and emotions as well as behaviour. The more you drink, the greater the effects.

The intensity of effects can differ greatly from person to person. Even people who always drink the same amount may feel the effects of alcohol more strongly on occasion. How you feel after drinking depends on your mood, your physical condition, what you are doing and where you are. If you are tired or are just recovering from a cold, alcohol’s effects on you can be much greater. Drinking can increase feelings of anxiety, or lead to aggressive, hostile behaviour, or produce depression. Your reaction to alcohol will also depend on the social demands placed on you. A few drinks with friends at a party can have a greater effect than a few drinks with family at a formal dinner.

You can become tolerant to some of the common effects of alcohol. Many experienced drinkers learn to compensate for some obvious signs of alcohol consumption and can act almost normally after three or four drinks. They may not appear to be impaired or necessarily feel impaired. But their ability to make quick, accurate judgments or perform tasks requiring divided attention, such as driving a motor vehicle, may still be impaired.

Although the effects of alcohol on a given person are difficult to predict, there is a general pattern of effects corresponding to a rising BAC. When alcohol first enters the body, many people experience an initial sense of well-being and relaxation. They may feel more at ease and more comfortable talking to strangers. Obviously, these are some of the reasons why drinking is so popular and why people continue to drink. But whereas alcohol’s initial pleasurable effects are quite noticeable, we often fail to realize that its impairing effects are starting to take hold at the same time.

We first notice the impairing effects of alcohol on complicated tasks demanding quick choices and accurate responses. After a few drinks, the rate at which we process information slows down. Our ability to concentrate on a task or to divide our attention between tasks decreases.

A few more drinks can impair your ability to perform tasks that normally require little thought or skill. Now the drinker has to concentrate just to avoid dropping things, to follow conversations, or to change the tape or CD. Simply moving about in a crowd of people at a party without spilling a drink or bumping into someone requires all of your remaining ability.

Consuming more alcohol will raise your BAC further. By this time, virtually everyone knows you are impaired. You are having trouble with muscular coordination, slurring words, losing balance and generally reacting more slowly. It may become difficult to focus your eyes. Emotional outbursts might express feelings of sadness or hostility.

Beyond this stage, you risk falling into a stupor and eventual coma. If the coma persists untreated for more than 10 hours, you may die of asphyxiation due to paralysis of the respiratory centre of the brain. Fatal alcohol poisoning usually occurs at BACs above .4. Deaths due solely to alcohol ingestion have been known to occur at BACs of .25 and over.

Turning a Car Into a Two-Ton Weapon: How Alcohol Affects Driving

Driving a car taps into almost all our basic skills — perception, attention, judgment, decision making, physical reactions — as well as our ability to coordinate these skills. Because alcohol influences each of these skills, it has many adverse effects on driving.

When we drive, we have to do several things at the same time: keep an eye on the road, watch out for dangerous situations, keep our vehicle in the proper lane and maintain a constant speed. Alcohol affects our ability to coordinate all these actions.

To demonstrate this to yourself, try counting backwards from 99 at the same time as you sort playing cards into the four suits. You can’t do both tasks simultaneously as well as you can do each separately. Even when you haven’t been drinking, there is a limit to how efficiently you can divide your attention. Relatively small amounts of alcohol can drastically reduce this efficiency.

Perhaps the most important skill for driving is simple visual perception. Even before moving into traffic, the impaired driver may have trouble negotiating the vehicle out from between parked cars. Our ability to judge distances between stationary objects is reduced at relatively low BACs.

Once on the road, the ability to estimate distances between moving objects is also reduced. Some people are affected this way if their BAC is as low as .02. Virtually everyone’s vision is affected at BACs of .1.

Driving at night involves additional problems, especially for older drivers who may not see as well in the dark as they used to. The ability to adjust to sudden darkness, called dark adaptation, begins to deteriorate at relatively low BACs. The greater the concentration of alcohol in the blood, the longer the glare recovery time. This refers to the period during which a person is partially blinded when exposed briefly to bright lights and then to darkness. This happens each time the headlights of an oncoming vehicle pass you.

When driving, we usually make a conscious effort to scan the road for signs, traffic and pedestrians. Impaired drivers tend to make fewer visual scans. They are also more likely to look at one thing, such as the lane markers or a traffic sign, for longer periods of time. Consequently, the speed of scanning the total environment is much slower and important objects or events may be missed.

Alcohol also affects our ability to identify the presence of objects on the periphery of the visual field. As a result, impaired drivers actually see less on either side and pay less attention than they should to what they do see. The danger is obvious: hazards and hazardous situations go undetected. An impaired driver may not notice a pedestrian stepping off a curb or may fail to see a car approaching an intersection.

Alcohol affects other skills critical for safe driving. In simulated driving tests, drivers with BACs of about .09 steered and braked more slowly and used the brake pedal more roughly.

As a depressant, alcohol affects our ability to make correct decisions at the right time. Under normal conditions, we continually make decisions to correct steering and change speed — usually automatically. The impaired driver either takes too long to make these decisions or, just as risky, makes the wrong decision altogether — both of which can have tragic outcomes.

Alcohol also affects judgment and can increase our willingness to take risks. Even if the effects of alcohol have not noticeably impaired our basic ability to drive, how we feel after drinking can lead us to drive dangerously.

Alcohol impairs everyone’s ability to drive. It doesn’t matter whether you are a highly skilled professional driver or a novice. It is a very non-discriminating substance. It places everyone at risk.

Is It Worth the Risk? The Odds Are Against You

Relative Likelihood of Fatal Crash
as a Function of BAC and Age
 

When we drive, we usually allow a margin of error in case of unexpected events — such as a car stopping suddenly or a child darting into the road. After drinking, we reduce this margin of error and increase our chance of being involved in a crash. The more we drink, the greater the risk we face.

The facts are clear. It has been shown again and again that increases in BAC are associated with an increased chance of being killed in a road crash. Even drivers with relatively low BACs are more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than the average non-drinking driver. At BACs of .080-.099, the risk escalates dramatically. And at BACs of .15, it is an astounding 200 times greater!

The risk of being killed varies with the age of the driver. The risk for drinking drivers aged 16 to 19 is greater than the risk for other age groups.

Let’s take an example. If you are 35 years old and are driving with a BAC of .080-.099, your chances of being killed are four times greater than when you are sober. But if you are 19 years old and are driving with the same BAC (.080-.099), your chances of being killed are 44 times greater than when sober.

Some provinces have responded to the increased risk of young drivers by implementing low or zero BAC limits for young and novice drivers. These zero tolerance laws impose fines and suspensions on young or novice drivers who drive after consuming any amount of alcohol. Considering that many young drivers are not yet old enough to purchase alcohol, it seems only reasonable that they should learn to drive safely without the added risk associated with drinking.

Nothing can be worth the risk of killing yourself or someone else. If you are a young driver, or if you are just learning to drive, don’t risk losing your life or your licence. Keep drinking separate from driving. You couldn’t make a wiser choice.