Stop Blaming Shitty Liquor For Your Blackouts
We all have that one friend who’s super classy. She refuses to go to hole-in-the-wall bars with you, always takes Uber over the subway, and hates drinking shitty liquor. When she wakes up after a super un-classy night of dancing on tables, falling over herself in a dirty club bathroom, and hooking up with a taxi driver; it’s obviously not her fault.
No, it’s the fault of the shitty vodka, or gin, or tequila that was served to her. It’s not like it had anything to do with her own choice to drink so much, if it had been Grey Goose or Patrón she would’ve been completely fine… or so she says.
Well, it turns out your pretentious friend is totally wrong, because according to doctors, blacking out has nothing to do with the quality of the alcohol you are drinking.
“[Blacking out] doesn’t have anything to do with the alcohol’s quality,” Dr. Roland Mader, a neurologist and consultant at Vienna’s Anton-Proksch Institute, told Vice in a recent interview. “In principle, the more concentrated alcohol is, the more dangerous. So hard drinks facilitate having a blackout more than others. But whether [you drink] gin or vodka doesn’t matter.”
While many college students have blamed cheap handles in plastic bottles for their incoherent nights of debauchery, it turns out that the type (or price) of alcohol you consume has no effect on your chances of blacking out. Rather, the alcohol content of your beverage is all that will contribute to your blackout.
So if your $10 handle of Burnett’s has an ABV of 40%, but your expensive gold bottle of triple distilled tequila has an ABV of 60%, the expensive tequila will still make you more ratchet than the cheap vodka. In fact, one of the reasons why you may find yourself getting less drunk at fancy establishments than shitty bars is because expensive drinks have more “fancy” mixers in them rather than actual alcohol — plus you’re not trying to spend as much money, so you’ll end up getting fewer drinks.
While we’re at it, another popular scapegoat for blackouts is the mixing of drinks. You’ll swear that you only blacked out because you mixed wine, tequila, and a gin bucket last night. However, Dr. Mader says that mixing alcohol won’t make you more likely to blackout, it will just make your hangover worse in the morning.
Alas, while it may be convenient to blame your drunken mistakes on the bartender, the alcohol, or that sexy guy who kept feeding you shots, the only person in control of your drinking is you. If you wanna get hammered and dance on some tables this weekend, fucking do it. But if you feel the need to get drunk just so you can blame your decisions on something besides yourself? Maybe you should work on that for a little bit before downing a cheap bottle of rosé tonight.
