 D O W N E R S: Alcohol What is it?Alcohol the oldest drug known to humankind. It was discovered by ancient people when they left some fruit out in the sun too long. The sugar inside the fruit fermented and turned into alcohol. Almost every culture on earth drinks a form of alcoholic beverage for religious or recreational use. How does it make you feel? Alcohol can calm down a nervous person or make a shy person more comfortable in social situations. Alcohol can make users feel "freer" to do or say things they normally would not. Too much alcohol can create uncontrolled mood swings and cause people to feel very confused. Sometimes those mood swings and confusion make people self-destructive or aggressive (violent). What does it do to your body? Alcohol effects all parts of the body. In limited quantities alcohol can reduce tension, relax people, and lower the risk of heart attacks. In greater amounts, it lowers blood pressure, slows reflexes and decreases coordination. (That's why it's so dangerous to drink and drive). Alcohol interferes with digestion, causes body heat to be lost, and sexual feelings to be dulled. Small amounts of alcohol increase breathing rates, but heavier doses can cause dramatic decreases in respiration. Alcohol use during pregnancy can cause lots of problems including smaller, weaker newborns and more miscarriages (uncompleted pregnancies that do not result in live births). Alcohol abuse ranks third in the U.S. as the country's biggest health problem. (Heart disease and cancer are numbers 1 and 2.) Long term alcohol abuse can cause deterioration of the liver, the organ your body depends on for certain vital chemical processes. How easy is it to become "used to" the drug? All drugs are poison to your body. But because your body is so amazingly devoted to keeping you alive, it can become "tolerant" to having poison in it. Your ability to become tolerant to alcohol depends on the way your liver breaks down the alcohol, so your body can handle it. But while the liver breaks down the alcohol, the alcohol is also destroying liver cells. So eventually there is less liver to do the job it needs to do. As time goes on, the drinker is less able to handle the bad effects of drinking. It also takes less alcohol to trigger those negative effects. The tendency to become an alcoholic may run in families. What is an overdose? Too much alcohol can be fatal. When this happens, usually the person's heart stops beating (cardiac arrest) or their central nervous system shuts down and they go into a coma and die. What's withdrawal like? Like an alcohol overdose, alcohol withdrawal can be fatal. It completely depends on how long you have been drinking and how much you have been abusing the drug. Even when withdrawal is not fatal, the symptoms can be quite severe. Some people have reported intense abdominal pain, vomiting, sweating, and diarrhea. Is it legal? The legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21 years.  Try this
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