DRUNKENNESS, a state resulting from excessive drinking, usually of alcohol (see ALCOHOL, PATHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF). It may represent either an act or a habit, the latter consisting in frequent repetitions of the former.
What appears to be "intoxication" may arise from many dif ferent causes, e.g., epilepsy, fractured skull, intracranial haem orrhage, the toxaemic coma of diabetes and uraemia and intense cold. The police records supply many instances of this statement. But, as a rule, the phenomena of drunkenness are actually due to excessive consumption of intoxicants. Some individuals have a special susceptibility to alcohol, due to heredity or to one of the sequelae of sunstroke or cranial injury.
The immediate effect of all intoxicants is a cumulative produc tion of paralysis of various parts of the nervous system, but this effect varies with the amount of the dose and also with the agent, the race and the individual. In short, from tea to haschisch we have, through hops, alcohol, ether, tobacco and opium, a graduated scale of intoxicants, which stimulate in small doses, and narcotize in larger—the narcotic dose having no stimulating properties whatever, and only appearing to possess them because the agent is gradually absorbed from the stomach, and the system comes primarily under the influence of a stimulant dose. In chloroform narcosis the stage of stimulation may be shortened or eliminated; while with tea, the narcotic stage is not readily produced.
In the case of alcoholic intoxication the senses gradually be come hazy, articulation difficult, a filmy haze obscures the vision, the head seems lighter than usual, the equilibrium unstable.
Soon ocular co-ordination fails, objects appear double or unstable, judgment ceases, the victim babbles with unrestrained communi cativeness; becomes quarrelsome or boisterous, till at last he falls on the ground insensible —dead drunk (alcoholic coma)—a state from which, after profound slumber, he at last awakes feverish, exhausted, sick and giddy, with ringing ears, a throbbing heart and a violent headache.
The poison primarily affects the cerebral lobes, and the other parts of the cerebrospinal system are consecutively involved, till in dead-drunkenness the only parts at work are those automatic centres in the medulla oblongata which regulate and maintain the circulation and respiration. But even these are not unaffected, the coma of drunkenness sometimes terminating in death.
The discomforts following an act of drunkenness are readily removed for the time by a repetition of the cause. Thus what has been an act may become a habit, all the more readily as the will and the judgment are progressively impaired. From this condition there is no hope of relief but in enforced abstinence; the drunkard must be regarded as temporarily insane (see INSANITY and NEU ROPATHOLOGY), and ought to be placed in a home for inebriates till he regains his self-control.
For the law concerning drunkenness the reader is referred to INEBRIETY, LAW OF. Its prevalence as a vice has varied consider ably according to the state of education or comfort in different classes of society and according to the mere facilities for obtain ing drink. Speaking generally, it may be said that in Great Britain drunkenness appears chiefly prevalent in the seaport and mining districts.
Analysis of the prosecutions for drunkenness shows that about a quarter of the total number of offences are committed by women. But there are important local differences. Whether in temperance is increasing among women is uncertain. There is no satisfactory way of determining the point, but the opinion is widely held in the United Kingdom that drunkenness in women, as in men, is less common, but spirit drinking is commoner than formerly. There is no doubt that during the World War for a variety of reasons, including compulsory closing of taverns and restricted sale of alcohol during certain hours, prosecutions for drunkenness diminished considerably and that they have increased during the years since.
See also LIQUOR LAWS and TEMPERANCE.