ALCOHOL NEVER STIMULATES

White Ribbon, Volume 23, Issue 9, 1 December 1951, Page 9

ALCOHOL NEVER STIMULATES

By W. G. Calderwood, B.Sc.

(Australian Temperance Advocate)

When the British Government set up the Medical Research Council to make a thorough examination of the alcohol problem, it assembled the most notable group of outstanding medical and scientific men ever commissioned to study that subject. Their findings, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, gave to the world the most authoritative, and one of the most comprehensive statements available on that question. For years it had been accepted by all authorities that alcohol taken in small quantities, was a stimulant. It was used as such by physicians in all parts of the civilised world. While there were those who held opinions to the contrary, it remained for the British Medical Research Council to establish the fact in medical and scientific circles that alcohol is always a narcotic—in spite of the fact that it appears both to the drinker and to the observer that its first effect is stimulating.

That explains the riddle of why a person who has taken only a very moderate, indeed almost a negligible drink of alcohol, is a decided menace in modern highway traffic. The alcohol which the drinker had has made him feel both lively and self confident. It has deceived him into thinking that he has been stimulated, and that, therefore, his senses are more alert, his nerves more active, his muscles more responsive, and his acquired skills and proficiencies more dependable. Solomon, the wise man of old, observed that whoever is deceived by wine—that is alcoholic drink—is not wise. The drinker thinks he sees better, acts more quickly, and with greater skill The British Medical Research Council say that he is wrong; that alcohol, even in small doses, makes a time lag in his actions that often makes a trifle a tragedy