I have had friends/family who have passed away from long term use, or one day they just didn’t wake up after a night of drinking =[. Wtf is going on?
In: Biology
Alcohol is damaging to your body, it is a poison that will shut your organs down if you use too much of it.
[https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/how-alcohol-affects-your-body](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/how-alcohol-affects-your-body)
Alcohol shuts(numbs) down the central nervous system. You need that to breathe. So drinking too much can cause you to stop breathing and die.
Long term heavy (as in wake up and start drinking) use leads to various organ damage, most notably liver, but also pancreas and all over your digestive tract. If they didn’t wake up after a night of drinking its most likely a heart attack from being out of shape (which most alcoholics are) and that being pushed over the edge by a blood pressure spike caused by binge drinking. See for example James Gandolfini.
There are several ways alcohol/alcoholism can kill you.
1. Overdose – it’s a depressant and you can stop breathing or pass out and lose your cough reflex so you vomit and drown in it or develop a severe lung infection and possibly die from that. Especially true if it’s mixed with drugs/meds that magnify alcohol’s effects.
2. Accidents/falls/injuries while intoxicated.
3. Withdrawal – sudden withdrawal in a severe alcoholic can cause a severe, long-lasting seizure which can kill you.
4. Chronic liver damage leads to inability to clear toxins from the body, particularly ammonia, and this can lead to coma and death.
5. Chronic liver damage leads to high blood pressure in the veins of your throat and stomach (and other places) which leads to increased risk of severe bleeding and vomiting/pooping blood to death.
6. Chronic liver damage can lead to a build up of fluid in the abdomen called ascites and this can spontaneously become infected and you can die from that.
7. Chronic liver damage can lead to kidney damage, and that causes problems with clearing waste, excess fluids, and electrolyte imbalance (especially potassium) and you can die from any of those.
Those are probably the more common ways, but there are others too.
Long term use damages your organs and destroys your health over time.
Dying from alcohol poisoning can happen to anyone who drinks way too much in one sitting. Your body takes time to process alcohol, so if you drink right up to the point you pass out, your body is still absorbing alcohol even while you are unconscious. Enough alcohol can suppress your breathing reflex or you could throw up while passed out and choke to death.
Many things have been said already. Just my 2 cents.
My dad was an alcoholic, he passed away a few years ago. His last 5 years he suffered from vascular dementia, which was induced by high blood pressure. Frequent consumption of alcohol a) further increased the blood pressure, b) made him sufficiently lethargic to not see a doctor for 40 years, and c) damaged his body so far that a minor lung infection basically instantly killed him.
So even without direct effect, alcohol can easily kill you.
My cousin was an alcoholic and he died last year just like OP mentioned in his post. He just went to sleep one day and never woke up. Coroner said it was due to liver failure. Alcohol is a poison.
You need ingredients in your system and a healthy liver to not convert alcohol into more poisonous stuff.
Your body is a complex chemical conversion system. Watch YT videos from cubbyemu, he explains alcohol metabolism very distinctly and acutely, but basically the stuff that you ingest is mostly ethanol and liver breaks it down into 2 different compounds, when you’re able to it produces a compound which you can pass through your system similar to vinegar and kidneys etc. can expel it but if it can’t keep up then a highly toxic compound results called acetaldehyde which is like acetone and formaldehyde.
Alcoholics get something from alcohol that they can’t get anywhere else in their life.
Something so important to them that even when their organs are failing and they’ve lost their marriage and job and friends and family have all stopped trying to help them, and they’ve seen the hospital thirty times in 2 years, even then they keep drinking.
I was an over thinker who struggled to stay grounded. Alcohol, at first, made me feel like I finally arrived in the world, could finally express myself and be spontaneous and “real.” My perspective has changed since then, however my views now feel as real and as authentic as my worldview did back then. In retrospect the way I reasoned and lived was insanity.
Quote:
“Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false.
To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity.
After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again.
This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.”
It can happen quite rapidly.
I was a (relatively) healthy alcoholic until this year when #5 in [this list](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/Ed3eZXFzh1) almost killed me in August.
It took me by complete surprise, my feet swole up, I was vomiting constantly and then in withdrawals, shaking and sweating on the toilet pan puking and passing blood. A lot of blood.
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