What does it look like?
Alcohol comes in a wide range of drinks with different alcoholic strengths, colours, and tastes. Alcohol often has labels with helpful information, such as how many units are in the drink. All labels are required by law to display the strength of the drink (alcohol by volume or ABV).
How do people take it?
What we mean by alcohol here is alcoholic drinks, such as beer, wine, and spirits. The scientific name for the alcohol in these drinks is ethanol or ethyl alcohol.
Spirits usually contain a much higher concentration of alcohol than wine or lager and are usually drunk in smaller measures. Ready-to-drink ‘mixers’ and ‘alcopops may not seem like strong drinks, but they may contain more alcohol than typical bottles or cans of beer or cider.
How does it make you feel?
Some effects include Reduced feelings of anxiety and inhibitions, which can help you feel more sociable. It’s an exaggeration of whatever mood you’re in when you start drinking. Drinking much alcohol will make you intoxicated (drunk), which will show itself in increasingly slurred speech, lack of coordination and blurred vision.
The more you drink in a sitting, the more your judgement will be affected, and this can lead to doing things or taking risks that you otherwise wouldn’t.
What are the risks?
Physical health risks
Drinking alcohol causes a wide range of physical and mental health problems, either because of binge drinking or from regular drinking.
Binge drinking can lead to injuries from falls, accidents, or assaults. Drinking above the low-risk guidelines regularly can cause illnesses such as depression, high blood pressure, stroke, liver disease, and cancers of the throat, mouth, breast, and liver.
There are short-term risks like injuries and accidents, which can happen because of being drunk. These can include head injuries and scars and can sometimes be fatal. There are other short-term risks, such as alcohol poisoning.
Long-term effects include damage to the brain, body, and its organs. This can take years to develop and can lead to a wide range of severe health problems, like cancers, that you may not realise are due to alcohol.
Addiction
Losing control of drinking is known as alcohol dependence, which leads to an exceptionally high risk of harming their health.
Alcohol dependence can creep up on you. Your tolerance to alcohol gradually increases the more you drink, and the more often you drink, so you may find that over time, you need more alcohol to get the same effect; you may seem to be getting better at holding your drink when that’s a sign of a developing problem. This problem may get more severe as you drink more and more regularly.
People who are more dependent on alcohol may have withdrawal symptoms if they stop drinking suddenly, and these can be severe. In some cases, the withdrawal symptoms can be fatal, so that a person may require medical treatment because of this risk of death. Typically, the symptoms include sweating, shaking, nausea, retching and high levels of anxiety. Some people can develop hallucinations or fits or occasionally life-threatening delirious states.
Drinking heavily over several years can result in alcohol-related liver disease. Because the liver has no nerves, people are often unaware that they are developing liver disease until it’s advanced. A first outward sign might be jaundice when the skin or whites of the eyes turn yellow. If someone develops jaundice, they must get urgent medical care.