“You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,” White said.
You’re just not going to remember it. That could be ordering stuff on Amazon. People tell me this all the time.…People can do very complicated things. Buy tickets, travel, all kinds of things, and not remember.
It follows that it’s really hard to tell, just by looking at someone, whether they’ve blacked out. It’s like trying to figure out if someone has a headache exclusively from the expression on their face. “I might look a little drunk, I might look wasted, but I can talk to you,” White said.
I can have a conversation with you. I can go get us drinks. I can do things that require short-term storage of information. I can talk to you about our growing up together.…Even wives of hardcore alcoholics say they can’t really tell when their spouse is or is not in a blackout.4
When Goodwin was doing his pioneering work in the 1960s, he assumed that only alcoholics got blackout drunk. Blackouts were rare. Scientists wrote about them in medical journals the way they would about a previously unknown disease. Take a look at the results of one of the first comprehensive surveys of college drinking habits. It was conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at twenty-seven colleges around the United States. Students were asked how much they drank, on average, “at a sitting.” (For the purposes of the question, drinking amounts were divided into three groups. “Smaller” meant no more than two glasses of wine, two bottles of beer, or two mixed drinks. “Medium” was from three to five beers or glasses of wine, or three to four mixed drinks. And “Larger” was anything above that.)
Beer
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
46
73
Medium
45
26
Larger
9
1
Wine
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
79
89
Medium
17
11
Larger
4
0
Spirits
Male (%)
Female (%)
Smaller
40
60
Medium
31
33
Larger
29
7
At these consumption levels, very few people are drinking enough to reach blackout.
Today, two things about that chart have changed. First, the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, ‘Pft, that’s just getting started,’” reports alcohol researcher Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge-drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.5
Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation ago, has narrowed considerably—particularly among white women. (The same trends aren’t nearly as marked among Asians, Hispanics, or African Americans.)
“I think it’s an empowerment issue,” Fromme argues:
I do a lot of consulting work in the military, and it’s easier for me to see it there because in the military the women are really put to the same standards as men in terms of their physical boot camps and training and all of that. They have worked very hard to try to say, “We’re like the men and therefore we can drink like the men.”
For physiological reasons, this trend has put women at greatly increased risk for blackouts. If an American male of average weight has eight drinks over four hours—which would make him a moderate drinker at a typical frat party—he would end up with a blood-alcohol reading of 0.107. That’s too drunk to drive, but well below the 0.15 level typically associated with blackouts. If a woman of average weight has eight drinks over four hours, by contrast, she’s at a blood-alcohol level of 0.173. She’s blacked out.6
It gets worse. Women are also increasingly drinking wine and spirits, which raise blood-alcohol levels much faster than beer. “Women are also more likely to skip meals when they drink than men,” White says.
Having a meal in your stomach when you drink reduces your peak BAC [blood-alcohol concentration] by about a third. In other words, if you drink on an empty stomach you’re going to reach a much higher BAC and you’re going to do it much more quickly, and if you’re drinking spirits and wine while you’re drinking on an empty stomach, again higher BAC much more quickly. And if you’re a woman, less body water [yields] higher BAC much more quickly.
And what is the consequence of being blacked out? It means that