I’m not an alcoholic, but I do enjoy alcohol from time to time. I never get excessive with frequency or quantity, usually when I drink it’s just two to four glasses of wine. Maybe two or three times a week.
Alcohol has always been set apart from other drugs in my mind. It’s the most dangerous drug for which it is socially acceptable to use on a regular basis. It has this status because almost anyone can easily make it, and therefore it has been a staple of human existence for many thousands of years. The fact that our bodies can metabolize alcohol efficiently enough to gain useful calories from it suggests we’ve actually been using it for hundreds of thousands to millions of years.
If there’s any drug which comes close to being as inherently human as alcohol, it’s cannabis. And I’d say opium falls into third place.
My experience with alcohol is as follows: I enjoy something ethereal about being intoxicated. The dizziness, the nausea, the loss of motor control, the hangovers, the loss of inhibition, even the emotional numbness, that’s all secondary to some deeper feeling of sedation and contentedness when I’m drunk.
After thinking a lot about it, I’ve come to compare this feeling to being high on opioids. I know alcohol is primarily a GABAergic drug, but the things I enjoy about it aren’t things it has in common with the other GABAergic drugs I have experience with. I have a long history of opioid addiction, it does stand to reason I’d enjoy similar drugs. The thing is, I’ve been clean from full opioid agonists for several years. My mu opioid receptors are protected by daily Buprenorphine maintenance. This tracks of course, ethanol doesn’t bind to mu opioid receptors. But perhaps it’s indirectly activating them by triggering the release of endogenous opioids, commonly referred to as endorphins: Endogenous Morphines.
These are very short lived, but they do have enough binding affinity to displace Buprenorphine. If alcohol triggers the release of these things in the brain for hours rather than seconds, then it’s no wonder it at times feels so great to be drunk.
Do you actually get usable calories from ethanol? I thought it was metabolized to water and CO2. In the liver it becomes acetaldehyde (toxic), then to acetate (less toxic), and finally processed to carbon dioxide and water.
Any usable calories are usually from the sugars that accompany the ethanol in whatever drink; beer, wine, cocktail, etc.
You would think so, but even Vodka has calories and that’s just water and ethanol. There’s trace amounts of other stuff, that’s where you get the differences between types of vodka, but certainly nothing else that would have calories.