How High Am I?

"Don't drink too much" is a common bit of medical advice, but the trick has been for a man to learn how much is too much. Now a Canadian physician, Robert Gordon Bell, who has treated thousands of alcoholics, offers a formula which he believes any intelligent person can use as a rough guide to keep his drinking within safe & sane limits. Most people, he holds, will be less likely to drink too much if they are made to think about the problem and can learn where the danger is.

Dr. Bell's formula does roughly the same job as a blood sample, but with less mess, using figures instead of blood. When he described it recently to a group of Toronto businessmen, out came pencils and scratch paper for a flurry of quick calculating. Last week, Dr. Bell simplified his formula to read: L=7,000 A/W --13T

50 Milligrams Is Plenty. The all-important L of the formula (for blood-alcohol level) stands for the number of milligrams of alcohol in every 100 cc of a drinkers blood; W is the body weight in pounds; A is the intake of pure alcohol in ounces, and T (for time) is the number of hours from the onset of drinking.*

A 150-lb. man who has spent all evening nursing a couple of highballs made with 100-proof (50%) whisky can do his figuring easily. If he puts two ounces of whisky (one ounce of alcohol) in each drink, his A is 2. He multiplies this by 7,000; he divides the resulting 14,000 by 150 for his weight in pounds, and gets 93. He has been drinking for three hours, so he subtracts 39. Ergo, he has 54 milligrams of alcohol in 100 cc of blood.

Insidious Poison. This much may be all right, says Dr. Bell, but beyond that--beware. At a blood-alcohol level of about 50 milligrams, he finds there are usually "only mild sedative effects" of the type seen in ordinary social drinking. Between 50 and 150 milligrams there is a drop in tension and lowering of inhibitions, and many people begin to lose control of physical movements. Above 150, everybody has lost some control and is unsafe behind a wheel; at 300 milligrams (often below) comes unconsciousness, and between 500 and 700 death.

Dr. Bell emphasizes that individuals differ enormously in their ability to "hold" liquor, e.g., a scrawny, 120-pounder may be able to outdrink a heavyweight wrestler. But is the body is repeatedly subjected to massive doses of alcohol, sooner or later it can no longer adapt itself to the stress, and metabolism breaks down. Warns Dr. Bell: "Anybody who repeatedly drinks so that he has a higher concentration than 50 milligrams should take a look at his drinking habits." Always moderate in his own drinking, Dr. Bell has cut down still more since he started to see milligrams in every glass.

There is another handy feature to his formula: anybody who is too far gone to work it out is too far gone.

*The coefficients 7,000 and 13 in the formula are the empirical constants which Dr. Bell found necessary to use for approximating blood tests without drawing blood.

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