Responsible Service of Alcohol

Topic 3. Impact of alcohol

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3.2 Impact of alcohol

There are short- and long-term impacts on both the consumer and the community from alcohol consumption.

So what are these impacts?

glasses of wine

Short-term impacts of alcohol refer to the risk of harm that is associated with levels of drinking on a single day. These risks include accidents, injury and community violence.

Long-term impacts refer to the risk of harm due to regular daily patterns of drinking and the total amount of alcohol consumed per week. This is a serious contributor to ill health and can be compounded by the negative effects of smoking, poor diet and other drugs.

Jane Fisher

Jane Fisher

Jane Fisher, alcohol and drug education professional, gives an overview of the short-term impact of alcohol use.

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One of the major short-term impacts of drinking, is the danger of physical harms that people often encounter, so that can be through violence, through fighting, it can be through harms through being in a car accident or a boating accident, it can be harms through an increase in likelihood of sexual assault, it can be harms through unexpected falls, walking into doors, that sort of thing, because people’s co-ordination and judgement’s impaired. Often their behaviour changes, they have less inhibitions and so—and then some of the other short-term harms can be that people might end up making decisions that they might not have made when they were sober. So they might have sex with someone that they, under other circumstances they might not have agreed to, and so they might be opening themselves up to harms of contracting a sexually transmitted disease or an unwanted pregnancy.

Jane Fisher

Jane Fisher

Jane discusses the long-term impact of alcohol use.

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Some of the major long-term impacts of alcohol are the effects that it has on the body, so someone who drinks at harmful levels for a certain time or over time can be at greater risk of developing alcohol-related brain damage, but also the effect on their liver. Alcohol, actually, over time can affect most organs of the body, and the more research we do the more we find that alcohol is implicated in various cancers, so the more research we’re doing the more that we are actually finding that it impacts on our long-term health.

Today the National Health and Medical Research Council advise that the more you drink the more harm you’re doing to yourself basically, that the less you drink the less harms that you will experience. Apart from all of the physical problems that you can get from using alcohol, there’s also the psychological problems that can go with long-term alcohol use.

A lot of people with depression or anxiety or with a mental health illness or issue may use alcohol to self-medicate, to relieve their symptoms but conversely the more you use alcohol it can actually worsen or make someone depressed. So it can also affect people’s psychological health, but it also can affect their health by the fact that it can strain their relationships, it can interfere with their work performance, it can add financial burdens, it makes them much more at risk of accidents and things like that. One of the things that we need to be aware of is that some people are a lot more susceptible to alcohol harms than others.

Read more about the impacts of alcohol.

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