How much alcohol could someone polish off in a night?

Sheee-it...you want units? Bottles? Pints? Mixing grape and grain, what?

I drank 2/3 of a bottle of vodka by myself once. Wicked hangover for two days.

Richard

Oh, vodka, yeah. Sorry. Should read the posts closer in future.

I have a bottle in my kitchen, lemme check...

Okay, back. It's a litre bottle. If she's an experienced drinker, not having much of a hangover is realistic if she drinks half a litre straight up. Or maybe that's just me. Depends on her tolerance.

I'm Scottish, though. My blood is Type O-Smirnoff.

Oh jeez, you should have seen me about a decade ago. I could drink paintstripper and you wouldn't even know I was drunk.

Couple of litres.

I once blacked out for half an hour on 2l of cheap cider. But that was on an empty stomach.

There are a lot of variables here. If you look up blood alcohol content (BAC) on wikipedia, you'll see there is a chart giving weight to drinks to BAC.

Binge drinking means different things. Does she binge once a year, once a month, or once a week? Does she drink heavily on other days?

Long-term drinkers can hit .40 BAC without a problem and go considerably higher. Ten years of heavy drinking can send the .40 level higher, but without a better idea of her habits, I don't know by how much.

A drinker (even a nondrinker) could get through a fifth in a night. Depending on the time spent and weight and drinking habits, you might not even see any outward signs.

I've seen long-term drinkers who buy Vodka by the gallon, and use two or three gallons per week. I think realistically you could have her go through a half-gallon before she passes out, using a weight of 130 pounds and starting drinking at 4 PM (when she gets out of work) and going to midnight or so. BAC would probably be something like .45 (normal people are dead at this level), but with a long-term heavy drinker, this number is no longer fatal.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Jim's right about the variables. Are you more interested in showing the sheer amount of vodka she can drink or how she acts when she's hit her limit?

I'd believe she could drink a fifth on her own, and be more or less fine the next day, with all the intended consequences of blacking out, etc.

scarletpeaches said:

I have a bottle in my kitchen, lemme check...

Okay, back.

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I can't tell. Did you drink it all, or just check how much there was...?

If she's an experienced drinker, not having much of a hangover is realistic if she drinks half a litre straight up. Or maybe that's just me. Depends on her tolerance.

I'm Scottish, though. My blood is Type O-Smirnoff.

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Tolerance aside, anyone can avoid a hangover if they know how. It's essentially dehydration--drink enough water while you drink, and you'll never get one in the first place.

And just because I have to...

Smirnoff? Come on. Stoli!

Freakin' Scots...

Well, I once drank half a bottle by myself when I was about 14 (straight from the bottle, too). My hangover wasn't even all that bad. So I don't think a whole bottle would send a grown woman to the hospital. Maybe a bottle and a half without problems?

JClark is right. A heavy drinker will go through a couple of gallons of vodka a week--and vodka is always a favorite. On a binge night, your MC may have tried to stick with a few beers initially (thinking staying away from the heavy liquor makes them not an alcoholic) but then they'll succumb to drinking the fifth of vodka at least. THEN (if the person was ill-prepared) he/she'll go into a panic of sorts looking for something else to top it off, maybe resort to some old bottle of table wine in the cabinet and drink that too. That would be enough to make him/her pass out eventually and feel pretty crappy the next day.

had to chime in with personal experience(s)...

When I was 17 and still a "puppy" at binge drinking, four friends and I finished six cases of beer. Wisconsinites + weekend + lake = average summer party. Of course, I think half the cans were in varying states of fullness (or emptiness) the next morning around the campsite. (hard to figure out where you set it down in the dark) Oh, and my friends... 120lb girls.

Then there were the college days. A frat house on Mifflin St. bested the Delta Drunk record by going through 35 half barrels one Saturday night. (University of Madtown!)

Flash forward to my ex's long term abuse of alcohol. His bar tab was 80-200 or more each week, every week. He'd drink Rumple Minze for giggles. Between him and two others, they finished a 70cl bottle along with tap beers during a time period of 5pm to 10pm. Then they decided to coke it up and go to a biker party for two days. Unfortunately, he lived. And I couldn't kill him.

When I still drank, I could easily down 6-8 beers without "feeling drunk" and without a hangover. (120lbs) If I drank mixers, I could go through at least 10 Jack and Cokes, of course I'd have to jump on something because of the sugar rush. If I stayed away from wines and rums, I never had hangovers and didn't black out either.

Tequila...reference Jack above and multiply it by 20, add fists and hair pulling, and throw in some colorful language, mix well and try not to throw up. I drank a half of bottle (not fifth, the next one up) one night, with beer(guessing 6-8?), and burritos. That was 6pm to 4am+ though. So almost twelve hours for all that. 'Walked home and made myself an omelet.

A fifth is barely enough to qualify as a binge for problem drinkers.(more like a party) A fifth and a twelve-pack...now you're getting the idea.

The ex's step mom could go through a fifth of scotch in a day at age 68 weighing in at a whopping 106. (that was when she was just taking it easy) She smoked constantly, and tanned until she was shoe leather over bones.

You remember that old lady who is the afterlife's receptionist in Beetlejuice? That was Gramma Dee's type, smoker's voice and all. "Commavah herend give gramma a kiss." *shudder* She outlived his dad.

Hope those little stories helped. It counted as therapy for me.

kuwisdelu said:

I can't tell. Did you drink it all, or just check how much there was...?



Tolerance aside, anyone can avoid a hangover if they know how. It's essentially dehydration--drink enough water while you drink, and you'll never get one in the first place.

And just because I have to...

Smirnoff? Come on. Stoli!

Freakin' Scots...

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Might follow your recommendations. The last few times I've drunk Smirnoff it's sent me into a coughing fit and I've had a sort throat the next day.

scarletpeaches said:

Might follow your recommendations. The last few times I've drunk Smirnoff it's sent me into a coughing fit and I've had a sort throat the next day.

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That would be the 40 Embassy Regal you had alongside the Vodka

Willie, anither Scot, and with plenty Vodka tales of his own to tell

Ick. I've never smoked.

thethinker42 said:

Mostly I just want to make sure I don't say "she drank X" amount, when that amount would likely kill someone twice her size. If I say a character killed a fifth and a half of vodka in a night, I don't want someone stopping and going "WTF? She'd be dead!"

She drinks herself stupid, passes out, etc. I just want to make sure I don't kill her. LOL

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You don't show how much she drinks, you show the result. Have her pass out and transported to the local ER. They'll take her BAC. Then the conversation goes something like this:

Experienced doctor or nurse: "Shit, she's .42."
Newbie doctor or nurse: "I thought .4 was dead." (Lots of disbelief can be shown here.)
"No, not for a chronic drinker. Our record ETOH (ethanol) is .63." (All ERs that I know of keep track of their record. World record that I'm aware of is a .9 something.)
"Oh."
"Bet her liver's just about short. Hook up an I.V., have security keep an eye on her, and I'll check back in a couple of hours."

She won't remember how much she drank, although she'll probably remember if she made a switch and blame that for what happened.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Have her clean up the next morning, tossing out the bottles, shocked when she sees she drank the cooking sherry. (If you've ever tried drinking cooking sherry, you'd understand the significance of this.)

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

I found this in Yahoo answers:

There are a few factors that come into play, your sex and body weight for example.

.40% blood alcohol content is generally considered lethal, though it may be somewhat more or less depending on the individual.

Generally speaking, a 100 pound man or woman who consumed 9 or 10 standard drinks in less than one hour would be in the lethal dose range.

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