Health - Alcohol: lightweight or real problem?

[bcubed]

SWIM recently went out drinking with his ma for the first time. He was astounded to notice she got literally falling-down drunk off 4 glasses wine.

Now, SWIM's mom is probably 150#/68kg. Is this low a tolerance possible without any kind of underlying neural pathology? She's an infrequent (say 1x/week) drinker. SWIM probably drinks 1-2X/week and his 200# body would probably require 12 drinks to reach an equal intoxication.

Incidentally, SWIM would be very surprised if she was doing any kind of downer, prescribed or not.

[Alicia]

everyone has different sensitivities to drugs like alcohol , swia can drink more wine then her partner. However he can drink more spirits. it purely varies on people on how it effects them i would not suspect there is anything wrong with your mum.

downers can increase that effect thou but if you doubt, then probly not.

[Zaprenz]

...alcohol is also a drug which can have quite a large placebo effect (in terms of the degree of intoxication one thinks they have) - SWIM believes this is particularly relevant to hidden extroverts for example.

Not trying to suggest this was the case above but you can get some people who relax MORE than one would expect for a given amount of alcohol because they consciously or sub-consciously know the next morning they can use the "I was drunk" excuse for stupid behaviour.

Almost like self hypnosis especially when one follows a regular routine of going to the pub at regular times, as soon as they walk through the door they relax and act drunk.

[shoobie]

Swim agrees your mom is probably just considered a lightweight> If she just has one glass of wine a week , then four should probably knock her on her ass. If swiy is concerned, you could ask her if she is being prescribed any new meds, but swim thinks she just had one too many, and that happened to be just 4 glasses. Besides, red wines, can vary by potency by a great deal, especially if you are drinking port wine.