Man Evicted From Chicago Drawbridge

[wolf]

Your heart can explode with one rock's worth of crack in your system, where even if you're NOT addicted to heroin, if you do one bag, you're not likely to die from it. Crack is kind of like ... South Central LA Roulette. You never know if the chamber's empty. Of course, when you play with an automatic weapon, you have to expect casualties.

You can die of the drug, or you can die of the effects of the drug. Yeah, the end result in all cases is that your heart stops, but it's a matter of why. You drink too much. Your blood volume gets to the point where there's more alcohol in it than oxygen. At .08 you're a little giddy and goofy. At .80 (meaning 80% of your blood volume is alcohol) you're dead because your little corpuscles can't compete, can't carry oxygen and other nutrients around your body, your liver is so busy trying to clean out the alcohol that it's ignoring the contaminants that are it's usual job and ... bing, you're dead. Poisoned by alcohol.

(.80 is a gross exaggeration, but it made a nice comparison to "legally intoxicated". Conventional wisdom is that a BAL of .70 is not survivable. I have personally seen .65 drunks barely walking and talking, but surviving against all expections.)

Actually, what gets more drunks than anything else is not drunkenness itself, but the long term consequences thereof ... organ failure, brain damage, and so on. I regularly get .20 and .30 drunks. Since the anorexic chick got sober, I don't see .500s very often, not on my doorstep, anyway. And we're doing a better job at getting the cops to understand that they need to take the really drunk ones to the emergency room first. I have seen ER reports on high numbers, though.