Ways Alcohol Affects Your Health

There are lots of well known ways that alcohol will affect your health, here are some facts that you might not be aware of.

• When you drink alcohol your body will prioritize it over anything else that you have eaten or drunk
• Too much alcohol can cause your heart to become weak 
• Too much can put you at risk from high blood pressure
• If you drink almost every day of the week it can impact your immune system and you will catch more colds than a non drinker.
• Drinking increases your chance of getting many cancers including: cancer of the mouth, esophagus, throat and liver
• You may also develop  pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas

If you drink too much your liver simply cant keep up meaning that alcohol accumulates in your system it starts to destroy cells and after a long time organs. Obviously your liver is affected first this is the main health problem that people usually associate with alcohol excesses.

Rising toll of drink driving by stressed working women

Heather Ward a road safety expert says that women are making up a greater proportion of drink drivers because of the stress in their lives. 
 
Family problems such as marital breakdown and children leaving home are a factor behind many – particularly professionals in their 40s – getting behind the wheel when they are over the limit.
 
Mrs Ward, a road safety consultant at University College London, was speaking at the UK Road Safety Summit on drink, drugs and mobile phones recently and called for a lower breathalyser limit because the current threshold is based on how men, who have larger bodies on average, metabolise alcohol rather than women.

She said women’s bodies process alcohol differently meaning they reach higher blood alcohol concentrations than men when drinking the same amount, even when body weight is taken into account. Stress levels and diet can also affect how alcohol is processed by the body.
 
Mrs Ward said: ‘Women in their middle ages are often fairly stressed. They’ve got family issues, children leaving home, marital breakdown. I spoke to one woman whose husband had left her for a younger woman and she started to drink. She got in the car and she was caught.

Her research has found women in their 40s were more likely to be over the limit than men of a similar age, once the proportion of time they spent on the road was taken into account. It also revealed the proportion of drink driving convictions committed by women nearly doubled from 9 per cent in 1998 to 17 per cent in 2012, despite the overall number of convictions dropping. While the conviction rate for men halved from 0.49 per cent to 0.24 per cent between 2003 and 2012, the rate for women changed ‘very little’ from 0.07 per cent to 0.06 per cent.She said other reasons women were drink-driving included professional pressures and safety concerns.

‘Women are drinking more,’ she added. ‘There is more (social) permission for them to drink: they settle down later, they work longer hours, they go out socialising after work, they get on the train, they get in the car left at the station and drive home – and they get caught drink driving.‘A lot of them are frightened of using taxis, they are worried about using public transport, so they think: “I’ll take the risk”.’

She said nearly 60 per cent of the women who were asked why they drove when over the limit said they felt they ‘knew’ their own bodies.
 
Just under a third felt it would be ‘OK if I drove carefully’, while one in six felt there was ‘no alternative’ – for example because one of their children needed help. Around one in seven felt they would not get caught because police ‘only stopped men’.
 
Mrs Ward said many women still believed they would be fine to drive ‘after a couple of glasses of wine’ but that most were unaware that wine was served in larger glasses and had got ‘stronger and stronger’ over the past decade. Mrs Ward said most anti-drink-driving advertising was targeted at men, which meant women could feel it did not apply to them. She added: ‘We need to recognise that women need to be thought about more, and more messages directed at them.’
 
The research she co-authored, published last year, was led by Dr Claire Corbett, of Brunel University, supported by insurers Direct Line, the Rees Jeffery Road Fund and Social Research Associates. It concluded: ‘There is a case for lowering the limit to reflect the effect of alcohol on women’s bodies.’ The current drink drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 80mg in 100ml of blood, which is equivalent to two units.
 
Source

Drink driver who cannot stand

Whoops! Yeh.. I don't think that you're going to test under the limit somehow!

This police footage shows how a man who crashed his car could not even stand when he was arrested.

Robert Hutchinson was spotted by a member of the public driving his Nissan Almera erratically on the A281 heading towards Horsham at 5.45pm on Friday 30 January.

As the witness phoned police to describe what he could see, Hutchinson veered off the road, overcorrected and crashed head on into a Ford Ka heading south on the road at Mannings Heath.

The Ford span around and the Nissan ended up in bushes.

The driver of the Ford, a 42-year-old woman from Plummers Plain, suffered slight injuries. Hutchinson was not injured.

When police arrived they found Hutchinson was still sitting behind the wheel.

CCTV footage recorded inside Worthing custody centre shows how he fell off a chair and into a wall while waiting to be breathalysed. To watch the footage visit https://youtu.be/6q4nCjPakyQ.

He was so drunk that an officer had to help him to his feet and hold him up to stop him falling down again. Hutchinson was found to have 169 microgrammes of alcohol per 100 millitres of his breath - almost five times the legal limit of 35 microgrammes.

The 59-year-old told police he had been drinking for several hours at home that afternoon but had decided to go shopping for food and then crashed his car.

He had already served a ban for drink-driving after being convicted in 2009 and did not have a driving licence.

Hutchinson, of Fir Tree Close, Plummers Plain, pleaded guilty to drink-driving, driving without a licence and driving without insurance when he appeared at Crawley Magistrates' Court on 23 February.

He was banned from driving for five years, given an 18-week suspended prison sentence, told to do 300 hours of community service and ordered to pay £85 costs and an £80 victim surcharge.

Chief Inspector Phil Nicholas, from Surrey and Sussex roads policing unit, said: "The footage shows just how drunk Hutchinson was, yet he thought that it was acceptable for him to drive in that condition.

"It is vital that we get people who think that it's ok to drink and drive off the roads.

"We need the public's help to tell us whenever they see someone who could be drink-driving so that we can act before someone is seriously hurt or even killed."

People in Sussex can text officers on 65999 with the details of people they suspect of drink or drug driving or visit www.operationcrackdown.co.uk.

You can also contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

To keep up to date with officers looking for drink drivers, follow #opdragonfly on Twitter.

If you know someone is driving while over the limit or after taking drugs call 999.

Limit bar licenses to cut alcohol related violence (80 per cent of evening arrests drink-related)

Image Source independent.co.uk

Alcohol related violence could be cut by limiting the number of licenses issued to bars and pubs, according to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Britain’s most senior police officer.

80 per cent of the arrests in the evening are drink-related and Sir Hogan-Howe said more had to be done to control the supply of alcohol.

“We need to make sure there is good control of the supply of alcohol,” the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts in London on the future of policing.

He added: “This means licence numbers, density and licensee regulation being a priority for local authorities, however much they would like to develop their local economies.”

While he understood that local authorities were keen to develop their economies with more licensed premises, he said it was important they considered the wider implications of having too many pubs in one area.

“We know that many injuries occur inside or outside licensed premises, and if we can close down repeat offenders, we will. The system needs reform and we need to police it better,” he added.

Drinking Behind The Wheel

We'd never encourage the act of drinking and getting behind the wheel. But when it comes to having alcohol in your car, Only in Mississippi is it legal to drive while drinking an alcoholic beverage, according to the aptly named site OpenContainerLaws.com.Which means that they can have a drink on their drive home from a hard day at the office!

Source: distractify.com

Sneaky ways that alcoholics can hide alcohol

Sometimes if you have a =n alcoholic in the family it can be useful to know of hiding places that might be a little more inventive. There are some very sneaky alcohol flasks out there including:

Hairbrush that can hold 6oz of beverage

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Camera that can hold 5oz of beverage

Sun lotion bottle - this holds 8oz

Lastly available in a  range of colours, and holding 250ml of booze a tie

Average of £50,000 is Spent by Each Briton During Their Lifetime

According to a recent survey which was compiled by Macmillan Cancer Research, Some Britons spend more than £150,000 on alcohol in their lifetime and that on average £50,000 is spent by each Briton during their life, However, a massive 1.3million spend more than triple that, shelling out on around £167,000 throughout their lifetime.

The Daily Mail reported that the survey - which involved 2,000 people - also showed that one out of three people said that wine was their favorite tipple, followed by beer and then spirits.

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Woman who ran drink-drive awareness courses caught three times the limit

Photo: RICHARD LAPPAS (Telegraph)

Alison Baker who ran drink-drive awareness courses for more than 20 years has been banned from the road after being caught three times the limit.

She was caught after Devon Greening saw her stumbling into the garage store (where he worked behind the counter) for a second time at 10.30am to buy a second bottle of wine. He said she smelt strongly of alcohol and he was so concerned she might hurt someone that he called the police.

Officers quickly turned up at Baker's home and she was so drunk she had to grip walls and furniture to stand. She told police she had only had a "gulp" of wine, but recorded a reading of 104mg of alcohol in 100ml of breath - three times the legal limit

Baker, from Exeter, Devon, denied drink-driving and blamed the high reading on post-driving consumption.

After a trial at Exeter Magistrates' Court, district judge Stephen Nicholls convicted her of drink-driving and banned from her from the roads before she is sentenced next month.

Prosecutor Sarah Hornblower said the high reading was not contested by Baker, who claimed she was under the limit of 35mg of alcohol when she drove that morning in her Chevrolet Kalos.

The court heard Baker used alcohol for pain relief for arthritis and had problems with her knees, legs and wrist.

Giving evidence, Baker said she drank herself into "oblivion" as she self-medicated and would drink until she passed out.

She hid the empty bottles of wine, including in the equipment she used for her drink-drive awareness courses.

Baker, who ran courses for Devon County Council for 20 years, said in a previous interview about drink-driving: "The realities of life without a driving licence can be difficult to bear - some people lose everything."