Alcohol & Driving: The Effects, Perceptions and Opinions
Road Safety, is one of the 14 modules, that I study in Transition Year, and it is a subject that is totally new to me, as there is no topic like ‘Road Safety’ on either the Junior Certificate or Leaving Certificate curriculum. The subject is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, which allows for a lot of discussions of opinions and perceptions in the classroom. This is why I decided to do a blog post on a topic of my choice.
The topic that I have decided to write about is ‘Alcohol & Driving’ as it is an extremely interesting, versatile, and sadly prevalent topic in Irish Society today. TY Students were also lucky enough to attend a conference on this topic, and its wider effect on people, in November in An Grianán Hotel, in Burt, however this blog post will be based on what I have learned in my TY Road Safety Module.
Upon, learning about the topic, I grasped many new perspectives on the topic. I firstly learned that alcohol is a ‘sedative’ drink, and this means that it can alter the drinker’s behavior, health or mental well-being in some way as soon as it is consumed. As soon as alcohol is consumed, it travels straight to the liver, before a sizable amount of the alcohol hits the brain within minutes. When alcohol reaches the brain it is described as a ‘Mind-Altering Drug’ which can affect a persons functions in some way. The way in which alcohol affects a person can vary drastically. Although there is concrete research that suggests some theories of why this is so, it is widely unknown how and why some people can’handle their drink’ better than others.
Another, aspect of this topic in my Road Safety Module, that I noticed, which had really interested me, was the concept of a ‘Blood Alcohol Concentration or BAC Level. This is a measure of the amount of alcohol per head amount of alcohol in a persons blood system. The legal limit for this is 0.8g/l. This means that for every litre of blood in a persons system, only 0.8 of a gram of alcohol is allowed to be in their system to be under the legal drink driving limit. It was extremely interesting to learn about this topic, as it was something that I had never learned about or experienced before.
I hope that this post will sum up TY Road Safety in a positive light, and that it may help to illustrate the topic of ‘Alcohol & Driving ‘ in a clearer light.
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