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Binge Drinking
- Catastrophic Results for Election Night (Drinking Games)- I had a hard time concentrating on a recovery topic during the final night of election mania so I combined the two. As you can see from the very helpful Google gadget you can track the election results by race, state, and county of your choice right here on TDA. On the addiction and recovery side, those of you planning to do the traditional election drinking games as described here, here, and here I have a little advice: Regardless of the election outcome binge drinking will only assure that you miss it. Alcohol will bring no solace to the losers, only more pain and neither will it bring more joy to the victors, only potential trouble. So please, stay here at TDA- safe and sober to experience in full awareness this momentous night. If a few decades down the road someone asks where you were on the night of election 08’, hopefully you will not have to say I don’t remember or that you were watching extreme wrestling at the county jail drunk tank!
- The Application of a Rough Truth-
Hat Tip and thanks to TDA reader Norman for the heads up on this one!
In Britain, the Drug and Alcohol Service of London (DASL) has launched a campaign against binge drinking targeting women by appealing to one of the less noble human qualities, vanity. Lord Lytton once said, “There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth”… and anyone who has woke up after a hard night drinking and looked in the mirror can surely attest to this fact.
The rough truth of the matter is that people who abuse alcohol not only have to battle the physical effects of harmful drinking, but also the damage that accompanies this kind of lifestyle. Sleep deprivation, cuts and abrasions, poor hygiene, and stress are just a few of the accompanying features of substance abuse to add to the DASL’s warning that, “Apart from a stinking hangover, it warns women they will also be more prone to wrinkles, bad skin, hair loss and weight gain if they knock back too much booze.”
They even created an application that allows you to upload your picture to simulate the effects of prolonged alcohol abuse. So I took advantage of this application to run a little scientific test myself. I ran two of my favorite female celebrities, both with substance abuse problems, through the program. Care to guess who is in recovery and who is not?
For answers, click “Read more” to continue… - Cool to be Comatose-
A recent report by ABC News details the trend of young women posting pictures on social networking sites such as Facebook that show them drunk or drugged and often in compromising positions.
My first thought upon reading this story was, “look at what those crazy kids are doing today!” Then I thought back to my drinking days (what I can remember), before the days of blackouts, tremors, and anxiety attacks when I considered drinking “cool”. Back to the time when the highlight of the weekend was playing a game of presidents and assholes with Ouzo or the time when we hog-tied in duck tape one of our passed out compatriots and hung him upside down from a stairwell… and I know I have no room to talk.
Click "Read more" to continue...
- Shrinkage: Like a Frightened Turtle- While regular readers of The Discovering Alcoholic already know that youthful binge drinking may lead to being relegated to the shallow end of the pool later in life, the lesson is often loss on teens and young adults. This article I found on TBO.com is an informative short piece meant to inform parents how to warn these kids about the negative effects of drinking. Of course when I was a teenage boy the warnings about alcohol poisoning and choking on my own vomit would have gone on deaf ears after hearing “or be more likely to take risks such as unprotected sex.” Instantly my next thought would have been:
“YOU MEAN THERE IS A CHANCE I MIGHT HAVE SEX!”
My advice to parents, stick to the warnings about brain shrinkage and hint that it also applies to the basement equipment. I will guarantee you that at least for young men, the warning may not be heeded but there is no doubt it will be remembered. And with that piece of sage advice I welcome you to the weekend with a very relevant Seinfeld clip.
Have a safe and sober weekend all!
- Binge Drinkers Relegated to Shallow End of Pool-
The New York times has a timely report on binge drinking which, if you look at alcohol related arrests and fatalities, will show a predictable spike New Year’s Eve closely followed by heavy drinking on Super Bowl Sunday. When I was a practicing alcoholic these days were special for me because my behavior was more “accepted” as even safe social drinkers pushed beyond their normal limits in reckless holiday cheer. Titled The Hangover that Lasts, the story details a study on binge drinking performed on rats at the University of North Carolina Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. To be more specific, the study was performed on binge drinking swimming rats!
Results from the study suggest that although binge drinking does not hamper the brain's ability to learn later in life, but it may affect a unique area of the brain causing "diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making". Simply put, binge drinking rats have a harder time relearning or adapting to change.
When put into a tub of water and forced to continue swimming until they find a platform on which to stand, the sober former binge-drinking rats and the normal control rats (who had never been exposed to alcohol) learned how to find the platform equally well. But when the experimenters abruptly moved the platform, the two groups of rats had remarkably different performances. The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.~ New York Times
Click “Read more” to continue…
