Blackout is a physical limitation of the individual, NOT a condition of drinking too much alcohol, as people are saying on here. There are people who blackout from one drink, some two drinking, some three, some four drinks etc.
It is often not an issue of drinking to get blitzed, as many blackout without ever getting drunk. (I suspect this is happening with a lot of college students and who that say they only had one or two drinks - they could easily be telling the truth, as they are clueless to their own “blackout” limit.)
I don’t understand how it even makes sense to say that blackout (alcohol amnesia) and unconsciousness “exist at the same time.” Either someone is awake and acting, but not forming long-term memories-- ie, they are in a blackout state-- or they are unconscious. They can’t be both at the same time.
However, I’ll withdraw the claim that the majority of people in an alcohol blackout don’t progress to unconsciousness. I still believe it’s true, but I can’t substantiate it with cites.
Edited to add: I question the idea that people black out from one or two drinks, or even three.
I would guess a 100 pound girl who hasn’t eaten anything but some lettuce could easily be black-out drunk after 3 shots or more in a half hour, less shots if she took a xanax that day.
Memory blackouts and brownouts are caused by a rapid spike in BAC. So your blackout chances go up if you guzzle your drinks quickly, you drink hard alcohol, and you drink on an empty stomach.
But you are only going to black out if you otherwise get pretty severely drunk.
This study says only 1 in 50 college students had a black out while just drinking beer. On average, the kids had 11.5 drinks before the black out occurred. The estimated peak BAC for blackout events was 0.30 for males, 0.35 for females. That’s very drunk. That’s not one or two or three.
I was being a touch facetious, but recall, in my youth, people who blacked out…and yes, they were very drunk but seemed to carry on…until the next day when they couldn’t remember a thing. Not me. I’ve never had a black out from drinking.
NOTE: The peak BAC measured above are for the visibly, identified drunk.
While the above cited is accurate as to the visibly drunk who is administered a BAC test and who has demonstrated to have blacked out, this data suffers from the “invisible man” problem that is ever-present in economics, and unfortunately is not accounted for in such data. I posit that it is this “invisible man” is the major problem on college campuses, not the overly-intoxicated, visibly drunk students.
The “invisible man” here is the cohort of college students (applies to adults as well) who blackout before being less than visibly drunk or impaired, but their inhibitions are already lowered (the lowering of inhibitions requires much less alcohol than necessary to be physically drunk). These students then go on to engage inactivities that they would not, and then say they did not agree to such activity, even though they did, and claim sexual assault because they cannot remember consenting.
However. the really vulnerable cohort of the above cohort here is the segment of students for whom the amount of alcohol required to lower inhibition is more than that required for them to blackout. This is the perfect storm because they blackout and then their inhibitions are lowered and they also claim sexual assault, even though they agreed to the activities. Worse, these students (applies to males and females) never really get visibly drunk or beyond a little tipsy.
I would put money that an ungodly portion of the sexual assault claims involve the two groups described above.
While I do not disagree with much being said not this thread, I do disagree to the effort to generalize a condition that is so medically varied to each individual. While limiting hard alcohol would reduce the blackout incidences for people with high tolerances for alcohol-induced brain impairment that cannot be generalized in reverse to say beer and wine would reduce the incidences of sexual activity that cannot be remembered and where a claim of sexual is made. This is because the alcohol content in beer and wine is more than sufficient enough to lower inhibitions and induce blackout for segment of the population.
Therefore. an unintended consequence cold be more students drinking beer and wine thinking somehow the beer and wine is safer - the result is the pool of students who are part of the two groups described above would increase, thereby more than replacing the number of students who are not rip-roaring drunk from hard alcohol.
I’m waiting for any evidence that blacking out (alcoholic amnesia) after two drinks is an actual phenomenon.
Some people experience alcohol amnesia while not being visibly impaired, and some people consent to sex when they are in a blackout state (alcohol amnesia) but not visibly impaired. That’s indisputable. It’s also indisputable that the person in a blackout state will not know they are in a blackout state, and certainly outside observers can’t know that someone is in a blackout state. These are issues we have to consider when adjudicating competing claims about consent.
The area of disagreement is whether this happens to people who have had two drinks.
There are many drugs ( and combination of drugs - some off the shelf), which reduce the efficacy of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), the main enzyme that metabolizes alcohol.
ADH efficacy is reduced with by: 1) a reduction in secretion of the enzyme or by 2) blocking the OH of the alcohol molecule from being converted, thereby reducing the ability of ADH to clear the alcohol from the blood, The result is one drink essentially has the effect of three drinks, as the alcohol is never cleared efficiently from the bloodstream. Therefore, yes, there are drugs when taken before drinking reduces the number of drinks to spike the level of alcohol in the blood to induce blackout.
However, the person may or may not be physically drunk at that point. This is because there are drugs (or combination of drugs), which can induce mild blackout conditions without alcohol, but the blackout effect is magnified by alcohol, yet the person is not even close to drunk and would not test as drunk either because his BAC is below legal limit.
@CourtneyThurston I owe you an apology when I called you out on top students drinking. It only took 2 weeks in college but the scales have fallen from my eyes. Wow they really do let go.
Plenty of drugs cause blackout. Those who’ve driven a spouse home from a colonoscopy may have seen examples of blackout. When I was taking my husband home from his colonoscopy, we had a long conversation about this and that. He seemed maybe a little less sharp, but certainly someone who didn’t know him as well as I do wouldn’t have noticed. When we got home he took a nap, and when he woke up he remembered nothing of my bringing him home or our conversation.
I question the claim that the interaction of alcohol and normal prescription drugs at normal doses would cause a blackout after two drinks, when the drug doesn’t cause that blackout alone.
“While limiting hard alcohol would reduce the blackout incidences for people with high tolerances for alcohol-induced brain impairment that cannot be generalized in reverse to say beer and wine would reduce the incidences of sexual activity that cannot be remembered and where a claim of sexual is made. This is because the alcohol content in beer and wine is more than sufficient enough to lower inhibitions and induce blackout for segment of the population.”
Theoretically correct, but practically speaking very wrong. As noted above, only 1 in 50 blackout-ers were drinking only beer. There’s a clear reason for that.
Blackouts are caused by a sudden spike in BAC. So the time element is key in addition to the amount of alcohol consumed. A 12 pack of beer is 144 ounces and, at 5% ABV, will introduce 7.2 ounces of alcohol into your system. But it will take you a while to down all of that volume. Maybe a BAC of 0.2 if it takes you two hours for a 180 pound male, which is pretty aggressive. Way too drunk to drive and pretty sloppy but unlikely to be blacking out, especially since the BAC is going up gradually.
Five 2 ounce shots of 151 Bacardi equals 10 fluid ounces and 7.5 ounces of alcohol (pretty much equal to the beer). If you want to, quite easy to down that in 15 minutes or less. That will get you a 0.3 BAC. That is the zone for blackout, unconsciousness and alcohol poisoning.
Yes and 12 beers is 1800 calories while 5 shots of rum or vodka is around 500 calories. My boys tell me that calories is one of the reason college women do shots…plus the bloaty feeling women get from beer. Guys do a shots too but mostly in conjunction with beers. Fewer guys drink “only liquor.” Not to say that guys don’t suffer blackouts…that can occur in both sexes.
@CourtneyThurston Just to add to our discussion and maybe this is different discussion but I was shocked at the amount of my fellow students who were smoking weed. Do you see this as well?
my son has a friend who says he doesn’t consider it a successful weekend unless he’s blacked out! For my son and others, babysitting this kid gets old. I think the worst time was when he was found wandering in the streets by the police who promptly locked him in the pokey to sleep it off. shaking my head, I just don’t get it.
Drinking to blackout is neither new nor ubiquitous. I kind of chuckle when I see NYT articles about this, because the author writes about it as if millennials invented it. In this case, it’s a college student writing it from their perspective - which is valid, but obviously biased.
The American College Health Association does a survey every year on college drinking habits. Although college students like to play up how much they drink in front of friends, if you ask them anonymously, it turns out that only about 50% of college students even drink at all, and less than one-fifth have ever binge drunk.
Still, it is a goal that a lot of students have. I do think most times the students intend to get to drunk but not blackout, but they miss the mark and drink too much too fast. But I have definitely heard students yelling things about wanting to get blackout drunk, not remember their own names or the date, etc.
Her reports about the ways in which students intentionally try to get drunk to blackout line up with my observations in student affairs work, too. I was sooooo weirded out the first time I broke up a frat party and saw a trash can of punch (called “trash can punch” at the school I worked at). At my college, we called it “jungle juice” and it was dispensed from repurposed water jugs/dispensers.
There are a small minority of college students who think that blacking out is funny, but in my experience working for student affairs most students do NOT think it’s funny. Most of the alcohol calls I’ve gotten were friends or concerned others who called the RA on duty, or public safety, because they noticed someone blacked out or close to it. I have also definitely heard college students be both concerned and judgmental about students who black out often. Most of the students I have encountered recognize it as a problem.
This statement, statistically, makes no sense. Just because populations overlap does not mean that you can make any causal or even correlational relationship between those populations. I can say that I can find many of the same people in the pool of people who like jeans and the pool of people who like pickup trucks. I can also state factually that most people who wear jeans don’t drive pickup trucks.
A person could even be more prone or at risk for two conditions and still not go onto to develop another one. For example, people who get other STIs are more at risk for HIV; the behavioral mechanism is even the same. But most people who get an STI will not go onto get HIV.
I am willing to bet good money that most of the people who go blackout drunk do not ever end up unconscious from alcohol. “Blackout” simply means that you are unable to form new memories; you don’t have to pass out or fall asleep to be blackout. It’s far more common than passing out/becoming unconscious from drinking too much.
According to the very American College Health Association you cite, juillet, about 20% of college students say they have never had alcohol. Another 16% say they have had alcohol, but not in the last 30 days. That’s 36%, which is nowhere close to “about 50%”.
Further, over 30% of students say they have had five or more drinks at a sitting in the last two weeks.
Of all students including nondrinkers, 21% say that in the last 12 months they have experienced "Forgot where you were or what you did " after drinking, at least once. Sounds like blackout to me. In other words, more than a fifth of students have blacked out from alcohol in the last year, which is a little hard to reconcile with your statement that less than a fifth of students have ever binge drunk.
Google is your friend. Use it before you spread inaccurate statements.
Is consumption more at liberal arts schools than say at a ‘honors’ dorm of a engg school? Some seniors studying engineering told me that they had little time to indulge. Comments?
I have 2 DDs, both in engineering/CS and honors, and I do believe there is less drinking and drugs within those groups. That is just based on my observations and what my DDs tell me. They find other things to do, as well as studying more. My youngest DD’s school has a no tolerance policy towards both and they publish crime statistics. So far, nobody in my DD honor’s dorm has been caught and that is not the case in the other dorms.