Concerning Alcohol

As that spring break is coming to a close, it seems I'm justified in discussing ethyl alcohol.  More to the point, I'll end by mentioning why I steer away from alcoholic beverages.

It's well known that alcohol is a depressant, but what does that really mean when compared to other sorts of drugs?  Depressants don't make you depressed in the psychological sense, obviously, but they slow down the various faculties of the brain.  Hopefully that's nothing groundbreaking so far.  Anyway, how it precisely works isn't terribly well understood, but the current theory is that it slips into the NMDA receptors located throughout the brain and causes a change in their activity.  (NMDA receptors are part of the mechanism that affects how neurons fire in the brain.)  The NMDA theory departs from a previous theory where alcohol interacts with the phospholipid bilayer that surrounds cells (e.g. the plasma membrane) that was once widely accepted but has since been disproven.

The major areas worth mentioning in the brain that alcohol has an effect on are the cortex (outermost, wrinkly part), hippocampus (not really a hippo or a school), cerebellum (lower and near the back), and the medulla (lower brain for lower brain functions).  When alcohol reaches the medulla, there's the disinhibition feeling people like to refer to as a social lubricant.  Inhibiting this region makes many people more talkative.  Alcohol in the hippocampus, where learning and memory are controlled, leads to less control of emotion and memory loss.  The next stop is the cerebellum, which leads to loss of balance.  None of those are life threatening in and of themselves, but if a high enough concentration reaches the medulla, which controls things like breathing, there's trouble.  Lower concentrations in this region have an anesthetic effect but higher concentrations lead to bad things like respiratory arrest and death.

Chemical dependence follows the usual pattern for dependencies using a pathway involving the neurotransmitter known as dopamine in certain fancy sounding regions of the brain including the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens.  The thing to take away here is that chemical dependency, more simply known as addiction, is a real disorder that has roots in the chemistry of the brain and is thus not just about willpower issues.

Unfortunately, the stigma in our society is that all drug problems are rooted in willpower issues and those afflicted with these problems will attempt to hide them, afflicting even more harm to themselves and those around them.  In the case of alcohol dependence, this includes missed days at work, the expense of purchasing alcoholic beverages, and cirrhosis of the liver.

Why is the liver affected, anyway?  It's because the liver removes toxins from the body.  Alcohol and drugs tend to be considered toxins by the body. There are two ways that it can do this, and it can use either or both in any order.  The first of these mechanisms is oxidation reactions.  (The second is conjugation reactions which are not important for alcohol metabolism.)  Primary alcohols are oxidized to aldehydes and then to carboxylic acids.  Oxidation requires oxygen, so when the liver uses oxygen for these reactions, it has less for its own tissue.  Thus, too much alcohol prevents oxygen from reaching the end of the liver furthest from incoming oxygenated blood and leads to liver death.  Evidence of the liver dying will be seen with too much protein in the blood and yellow eyes and skin.  (As a side note, methanol, or wood alcohol, causes blindness due to killing the nerve that goes to your retina, but competes for the same enzyme that ethanol uses)

While alcohol has its benefit in the sense that it can be used as a social lubricant, I tend to try to avoid it.  Being drunk tends to cause people to do things they probably would rather not have done, which is often recorded and posted on the Internet.  I'd prefer not to have any incriminating pictures of people floating around that damages their future prospects.  In addition, alcohol has different effects on different people.  I'm more inclined to become introspective and thus there is no benefit socially besides perhaps not feeling left out of a social standard, which in this case I'm alright with.  There's not danger of driving drunk if you don't drink, either, and you're also liable to get to bed sooner and thus not be on the road when those that are potentially drunk are out driving.

In the end, consumption of alcohol is all about preference.  Some people like the feeling of acceptance (whether true of perceived) that it brings them while I dislike the lack of control and forethought it can bring.  Those that consume it sparingly tend to associate with each other and those that drink more often tend to associate together, so it follows another pattern of other drugs of dependence in that case.

As a side note, it's interesting to note that alcohol has continually advanced with society.  As our sciences advance, the different varieties and qualities of alcohol products has advanced as well.  It seems that the production will only continue to advance with time.  Hopefully so will the ability to consume it responsibly.