Sauce, Science, Society

Its been around for ages, with no certain origin or story behind its discovery.  What I speak of, as you could tell from the title, is alcohol.  Historians date alcohol’s earliest origins back to around 8000 BC(E) when the Egyptians fermented honey into mead.  However, modern alcohols, such as beer and wine came around considerably later due to the complexity of their production; beer begins to appear in 3700 BC(E) in Egypt and wine appears around 5400 BC(E) in Mesopotamia.

It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that alcohol took on a new face.  During this time, history receives its first recorded use of alcohol creation for medicinal purposes in Solerno, Italy.  Along side this, we have the Dutch distilling liquor and adding flavor with juniper berries.  Regardless of its intended usage, by the 17th century alcohol was already a social norm, even finding its way aboard the Mayflower voyage, and eventually to the new colonies.

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Although alcohol’s long history may be interesting to some, I regretfully admit that I am not one of those people.  I take interest in alcohol’s psychological and physiological effects.  The active chemical in all forms of alcohol (wine, beer, liquors, and the like) is ethyl alcohol.  Once alcohol enters the human body, it begins to take immediate effect in the stomach.  As much as 20% of the alcohol content is absorbed directly into the blood stream from the stomach while stimulating the stomach’s digestive process.  It is because of this that the majority of the alcohol, the remaining 80%, is processed in the small intestine; the more alcohol consumed, the more the stomach is stimulated, and the faster it moves along the digestive tract.

Once inside the blood stream, alcohol is excreted in one of two main ways: through the lungs or through urine.  Excretion through the lungs accounts for only 5% of this total, but is the reason for “alcohol breath,” the principle in which breathalyzers work.  However, before the body can remove alcohol through urination, it must first be transformed into CO2 and H20.

Now that we’ve covered the in and out of things, allow me to elaborate more on the processes in between.  Alcohol is very fat soluble, and as such, can pass through membranes with ease (such as the blood/brain barrier and from mother to fetus).  It is because alcohol reaches the human brain with such ease that its effects appear quite rapidly.

Alcohol is particularly dangerous as a recreational substance mainly because of its depressant effects and its ED50/LD50 ratio of only 6.  What the latter means is that the “effective dose” for alcohol isn’t safely far enough from the “lethal dose”.  As a depressant, alcohol can cause the human body to slow normal functioning, impede judgement, and in some extreme situations, cause such levels of toxicity that the consumer dies.  The list of dangers from alcohol consumption are numerous: heat loss, risk of heart disease, risk of liver failure, elevated blood pressure, loss of REM sleep (resulting in non-restful sleep), fetal alcohol syndrome, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, black-outs, hangovers, cognitive impairment, and increased risk of adverse reactions with other drugs.  This list covers only the more common effects of alcohol and fails to fully cover the longer-lasting effects it may have.

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With this said, I feel that alcohol is a plague to our society, not only because of the dangers the substance presents on its own, but because of how our society treats the matter.  Although there is little in the black market of alcohol in the United States (save Absinthe and illegal sales to minors), alcohol has wreaked havoc on our society from its misuse.  Most of the prominent damages caused by alcohol in our society include death by alcohol poisoning and the results of impaired judgement (such as drunk driving).  These two alone should be enough for a reasonable person to condemn its usage, yet alcohol drinking is perpetuated by tradition.

For example, stories of getting “too drunk and blacking out” aren’t very uncommon and are presented in a comical nature, not as a life threatening situation.  Our society’s way of associating alcohol with a guaranteed “good time” and socializing is also considerably dangerous.  Ignorance also plays a role in this: a well educated populace on the dangers resulting from alcohol, would on average, approach its usage much more cautiously and with greater respect for its consequences.  In my own personal opinion, alcohol is most dangerous simply because of how our society co-relates alcohol consumption with positive things without emphasizing its dangers or moderate usage.  In short, we are preached two different messages: alcohol is bad and should never be consumed, and alcohol is fun.  Either side refuses to acknowledge the opposite and no middle comprehensive approach is ever given.

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Alcohol is legal – this is an unignorable fact.  The reasons for it being so, however, are much less solid.  Personally, I feel alcohol is legal simply because of tradition.  Many health studies have been done on ethyl alcohol and a large majority of them have found it to be a considerably dangerous substance (if only just on a physical level, excluding social repercussions).  It is also my personal opinion that we should have the right to consume whatever we so desire, even things that are physically harmful (nobody is stopping us from eating fast food, smoking, or having energy drinks).  However, due to alcohol’s ability to cloud judgement, I find it particularly dangerous within a society who refuses to acknowledge – and act accordingly – to its potentially deadly nature.

In short, I feel that alcohol, as a substance, should be legal, but should our society fail to show its capability to moderate itself – and view alcohol consumption as a grand privilege – the legal status of alcohol should be revoked.

-M.