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Is Alcohol as Bad as Everyone Thinks It Is?

Magdiel Bojorquez

Professor Cindy Chavez

Merced College

English 1A

15 May 2015

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Abstract

Ever since alcohol was invented there has alway been the lingering question of is alcohol

really as bad as everyone thinks it is? In this paper we will review this question by looking at ar-

ticles that view alcohol in different cases. These articles view alcohol in different ways, this can

be from how it affects bicycle accidents to how it affects certain age or ethnic groups. There are

some articles that will show us how experiments are done to figure out the affects of alcohol on

people. Then we will look at one article that actually challenges the results that have been re-

ported. When it comes to alcohol there has been much debate. Some say that if you only drink a

little it will not affect you at all. Others say that with just one little sip it could be all it takes to

cause damage, whether to ones self or others. In this literary review we will give as much infor-

mation on the subject to answer the question and also let the reader decide how he or she feels.

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Introduction

My research has all to do with alcohol. Since it was invented there has always been a de-

bate whether it is really bad on a human. There was even a time when alcohol was banned caus-

ing major changes in society. This increased illegal activity since it was starting to get sold in the

black market. When it was brought back the arguments began again on whether it really does

harm. It seems like everyone has their own opinion on alcohol. Some people say it does do harm

while some people say it doesn’t. There are many articles that talk about alcohol and this is

where it all starts.

Alcohol has created so much dilemma within people. Some back up alcohol while others

want it gone. In this research paper we will look at all the evidence that is available to us. Within

these articles we will look at their view or experiment done with alcohol. At the end of the re-

search paper we hope to finally answer the question that so many people have been asking them-

selves. Is alcohol really as bad as some think? We hope to finally find out.

While we are looking at articles and other peoples experiments, this sometimes could not

be enough. This articles do a good job at giving us a clearer picture of what alcohol does. The

problem is that we could only try to believe what these articles say. Some might have errors in

them while others might not even be true at all. The only true way we could be sure that anything

really is right is by doing experiments ourselves. Unfortunately in this research we were not able

to conduct our own experiment. What we did do however was gather as much information from

different places to try and get a better idea.

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Review of Literature

To start things off we will look at how some experiments or reports are being looked at.

This is an important one to start off with because it is good to keep it in mind while looking at

some of these results. In the article with Sadie Boniface it talks about how the numbers are

wrong when talking about consumption in adults. They are claiming that it is under-reported

meaning that not all of the data is being collected. They claim that only about 40-60% is being

looked at and the rest is being forgotten. When looking at all the data together it is said that both

the consumption of male and female are actually higher than what they are appearing. This is

critical because it makes it seem like the consumption of alcohol is lower than what it really is

and this could affect many things like the amount of people who really would need help. This is

crucial because that means that some experiments could mean that they are also reporting lower

numbers than what they really are.

One of the first question to answer when it comes to alcohol is why do people drink it and

what causes them to want to drink it. This is what Choi Yoon Jung and his partner tried to solve.

What they did was they wanted to see how the arousal of alcohol change the way they feel about

it. The way this test was done was by getting two groups. One group was people who had a high

arousal to the alcohol. The second group of people were the ones who didn't really have an

arousal to the alcohol. At the end of the test they were able to prove that people who had high

arousals craved it more than the people who are not as aroused by it. What this does is that it

shows that people who usually drink large quantities is because they could find it more arousing

than others.

While that article was more on a broad tense, Garyna Zajdow tried to narrow the field a

bit. What she tried to look at was younger adults and she talks about the opinion some young

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adults have over why they drink. Some people say they like to drink because they want to feel

“tipsy”. What tipsy means is getting to a stage where a person feels the effects of alcohol but still

have full control of what is going on. However, this state is really difficult to achieve because a

person does not know when they are at that point. It is really hard because before a person knows

it they go to far and start losing control of what they are doing. Then they see how those people

actual drink to see if they can really achieve the state of tipsy. It is this mentality that causes

young people to get more drunk than what they intended.

Still looking at young adults, we should look at how alcohol affects them in other things

that they will typically do at their age. Gary Liguori did this when a study was done in universi-

ties to see how alcohol affected first and second year students academically. The way they did it

was by asking students questions about them. Some questions were alcohol related in order to get

an understanding of what group they fell in. After researching 820 students, it showed that men

drank more than the women did. However in either case male and female students also showed

more problems in school. Many started falling low in classes and began having problems with

their academic performances. The more the person drank alcohol the bigger their problems usu-

ally were.

Now we can try to even it up a bit by showing how some people look at alcohol wrong

when it comes to driving. How might this be done one might ask? Well this is where BAC comes

into play. Mathieu Tremblay did an experiment with others, and the experiment they were doing

was how drivers compared with a high BAC, moderate BAC, low BAC, and finally sober. They

wanted to see if the lower of the BAC helped get closer to the driving done when in the sober

state. After the experiment, in the high and moderate BAC the driving was at a high risk as ex-

pected. However, as the BAC started getting lower the driving was almost identical to the sober

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state. This shows that having a small quantity of alcohol in the system does not do much damage

as some believe. What this did was show that there are some places where people overlook that

affects of alcohol and it could mean that this has happened in other things. This opens up a lot of

questions because this could actually make some experiments questionable.

Since we have seen what BAC levels can do, there is an article where we see how alcohol

in the system can change the outcome of an accident. Valerian Kwigizile shows how drinking al-

cohol and driving a bicycle whether it is motorized or not showed that the dangers were greater.

When the study was done it was done with both alcohol and drugs together. It was reported that

38.93 percent of the crashes with alcohol and drugs were fatal accidents compared to only 12.36

percent with no substance. Then they did alcohol and drugs separately to see if one had a higher

danger rate than the other but both came back to about the same meaning either of the two are

equally as dangerous than the other. So even if it is just on a motorcycle, drinking alcohol can

raise the risk of being involved in a fatal accident.

We all know that alcohol can make accidents more dangerous but what affect does it

have on a certain group of people. Louis Trevisan looks at things most people don’t and that is

how alcohol affects the elderly. This is mostly because some people do not believe many elder

people drink alcohol. The reason they do not drink is because alcohol has really bad effects since

their systems aren't as good as a young adults. It is said that once a person reaches around the age

of 60 consuming large amounts of alcohol can actually affect every organ in the body and not

just the liver. This makes in extremely dangerous if they do not control themselves. Overall it is

said that elder people who struggle with alcohol should be screened and looked after.

There is another group of people that are also looked at when it comes to alcohol. That

group of people is women. Weiwei Liu wanted to see if there was any connection with the age at

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which a woman had her baby and how often they drank. They wanted to see if women had their

children early if that caused them to want to drink more or sooner. They as well see what are the

causes of drinking and a big one seems to be depression. It is seen in the tests however that

women who have their children after 26 tend to have a higher rate of binge drinking that younger

women. However, if the women smoke, typically from 20-25 then they also have a higher rate of

binge drinking.

Women are usually the targets of many ridicule. If there is one thing that women get criti-

cized the most about is their children. Liezille Jacobs wanted to see one way their motherhoods

were looked at and that was how the society viewed bad mothers and how they automatically

think that they are alcoholics. However that truly isn't the only reason. While alcohol can be one

of the reasons, there are many other factors as well. On top of that it is hard to determine really

what a “bad” mother is. There is also the way that society believes that is a mother drinks heavily

that they are automatically bad also. This experiment was a bit more complicated because many

cultures and places have different views on things and so at the end there is no real definitive an-

swer. Nonetheless alcohol still made it easier to make women look like worse mothers because

they drank it.

To top it all off we take a different approach with the last article. Instead of looking at

how alcohol affects a specific group, we look at one that rarely drinks alcohol to see how they

compare. KyungHee and Ji-Su Kim looked at South Korean adults. They wanted to see how they

compared to others, by the amount of alcohol they consumed. They tested about 3,400 each of

male and female adults younger than 40. They used a special formula to determine where they

ranked. Surprisingly, it turned out that the average of all 6,800 tests that they ranked around

moderate drinking. This means there were very little no drinker or heavy drinkers. This means

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that almost everyone decides to drink a moderate amount of alcohol rather than drink any at all

or drink in excess amount. This however does not include older adults which could have a differ-

ent result. What made this article even more significant was that they tended to have a happier

life than the different people who did drink. This just greatly backed up the question that alcohol

really does do more bad than good.

Conclusion

At the beginning everyone wanted to answer the question and know if alcohol really was

as bad as everyone says it was. With the help of these articles we were able to finally answer this

question. Now while many people still have their own opinions, these articles clearly show that

alcohol does more harm than when you do not drink. Instead of just saying that it is bad, we were

able to see actual cases in which it really has done more harm than if it weren’t present. How-

ever, while this has made it more clearer, this still does not give a 100% correct answer. This is

because there could be some cases in which alcohol could do good than just bad. We were lim-

ited to the articles we could find in this research which gave us these results, but there could be

other articles out there that contradict these as we were able to observe with at least two that we

saw. I will not officially answer the question I brought up but I will give you this information

and let you decide what you think on your own.

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Works Cited

Boniface, Sadie, James Kneale, and Nicola Shelton. "Drinking Pattern Is More Strongly Associ-

ated With Under-Reporting Of Alcohol Consumption Than Sociodemographic Factors:

Evidence From A Mixedmethods Study." BMC Public Health 14.1 (2014): 1052-1069.

Academic Search Premier. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

Jacobs, Liezille1, liezillejacobs.phd@gmail.com, and Julian2, jjacobs@hsrc.ac.za Jacobs. "'Bad'

Mothers Have Alcohol Use Disorder: Moral Panic Or Brief Intervention?." Gender &

Behaviour 12.3 (2014): 5971-5979. OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson). Web. 6

Apr. 2015.

Kim, KyungHee, and Ji-Su Kim. "The Association Between Alcohol Consumption Patterns And

Health-Related Quality Of Life In A Nationally Representative Sample Of South Korean

Adults." Plos ONE 10.3 (2015): 1-14. Academic Search Premier. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

Kwigizile, V.1, Valerian.Kwigizile@wmich.edu, T.2, t.sando@unf.edu Sando, and D.3, dchim-

ba@tnstate.edu Chimba. "Understanding The Role Of Alcohol And Drugs On Bicyclist

Injury Severity." Advances In Transportation Studies 34 (2014): 43-54. OmniFile Full

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