KBCraig wrote:As for how alcohol can affect people differently, let me offer our example here at home. My wife and I stand almost eye to eye, and are roughly of the same build and weight (a gentleman never asks, and a smart husband knows better!)
As I noted before, I can drink 6 or 8 over a long evening without anyone noticing any visible effect. My wife, on the other hand, will attempt a half glass of wine about once a year, but will curl up and take a nap before she finishes it.
We joke that she's a cheap date.
Kevin
I am not sure that we don't develop "tolerance" too. My late wife was 5'11" although she lied about it and said she was 5'10", and somewhat lighter than me. When we both drank a lot, she could put me under the table, and I could out drink most others. We were not a cheap date by any means, on our honeymoon a businessman we made acquaintance with treated us to dinner and drinks and we spent the whole evening together with him picking up the tab (I don't know if he thought he had a chance with the new bride, but that's a whole 'nother story, he didn't believe we were newlyweds.)
The next morning we ran into him at breakfast and he wanted to know how we felt. When we told him we felt fine he was flabbergasted, and then he showed us a copy of his bar bill for the previous night, and I had put away 16 drinks with my bride matching me one for one until the last round when I got ahead by one. Then we told him that when we went up to our room we had had room service bring us each one more, which was true but we didn't tell him that we never touched them.
He figured we had had enough alcohol to knock us out for a couple of days and have hangovers for a week. The drinks we were downing at such a pace were called "Foolish Virgins" in honor of the Virgin Islands where we were, and were a concoction of rum, curacao, triple sec, and a few other things. They tasted like fruit drinks.
Years later when I was having internal difficulties and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong, they asked if I drank a lot of beer, and I told them no. Of course they hadn't defined what "a lot" was and I didn't think a six pack per evening, every evening, was "a lot."
Nowadays I can even feel the first beer, which I shouldn't drink because of the internal problems that sometimes result (food allergies are such fun), and about a shot and a half of my drink of choice, vodka, gets me to the point where I feel as though I shouldn't drive.
So I designate myself as the driver and always carry (unless prohibited).