Photo credit: Abby Stanglin CC BY 2.0
I smash out in that pussy and I pass out that pussy/We stop that nigga out and watch him drag out that pussy, yeah!/Living la vida loca, I hate being sober – Lil Wayne “Black Out”
[W]hile it’s arguably fun to get pissy drunk sometimes, doing it too often can have serious consequences.
Things like missing classes performing poorly on tests, permanent memory loss, cirrhosis of the liver and having everyone mad at you for things you cannot even remember are just some of the negative side effects.
 |
| Photo Credit: Ameila R. CC BY 2.0 |
And there’s a disturbing trend on the rise. Stats have shown that college-aged students are surprisingly casual when it comes to heavy drinking.
Take Kirby Martinez, for instance. He is a senior at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is majoring in mechanical engineering.
Although it was not intentional, Martinez said he has blacked out at least 20 times during an interview with The Daily Texan, which is running a series on the subject.
“I don’t go into the night being, like, ‘I want to black out,’” Martinez said. “I go into the night saying, ‘I want to get fucked up,’ and whatever amount of alcohol that’s going to take, I’m going to drink it. If that amount happens to be past the point of blackout, then I black out.”
Some students take the opposite approach and go into the evening with the intention of blacking out. It sounds like fun, but it also leads to risky behavior like drunk driving, having unprotected sex, and worse.
“It’s honestly kind of fun to piece back together what happened that night,” journalism major Jules Lawrence, who is a Junior at the University of Texas. “It’s like [the game of] Clue — you have some pieces, but you have to figure out what all the other ones are.”
So what’s happening to you when you black out? It turns out your brain is doing a lot more work than you may have even realized.
According to researchers, blackouts tend to occur when the blood alcohol content reaches about 0.15%. The liquor you have ingested starts to interfere with the glutamate compound in your brain that transmits signals between neurons.
 |
| Areas of your brain impacted by liquor |
The process makes the neurons create steroids that prevent them from communicating properly, creating momentary lapse of memory loss.
“Alcohol can produce detectable impairments in memory after only a few drinks and, as the amount of alcohol increases, so does the degree of impairment,” according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Large quantities of alcohol, especially when consumed quickly and on an empty stomach, can produce a blackout, or an interval of time for which the intoxicated person cannot recall key details of events or even entire events.”
Here’s an interesting fact. Females are more likely to suffer from blackouts that males, even when they’ve consumed the same amount of alcohol.
It’s even more pronounced in women because they have less water in their bodies. Also, their blood alcohol content increases faster men’s.
To make matters worse, about 97,000 students each year have reported alcohol-related sexual assaults.
So think twice before you decide to take too many shots of fireball or Jameson.
Screwing up your whole college experience, or the rest of your life is just not worth a few hours of fun that you’ll never even remember.
Before you forget, check out The Top 20 Colleges and Universities for Drug and Alcohol arrests per 1,000 students.
