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Comment by aspaceman | Hacker News Reader

Yeah my experience in the Marines resonates with this a lot. So many training meetings about how drinking and driving was bad, followed by a meetup at the bar. Even during the presentations the officers in charge would joke about it. None of it was ever taken seriously. The best example of double-talk I have in real life. Way they would talk about "partying in Okinawa" was always creepy when you consider the Marines' history there.

Not blaming anyone specifically of course. I feel for anyone who feels like they need to drink to get through their days. Just think it's also a good example of CO's talking big but meaning nothing, and that attitude trickles all the way down the chain.

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And your problem is here ?

If the meeting attendees where not driving after the meeting, I don't see the problem with social drinking and bonding.

Well, the original post said they were flying aircraft while still impaired afterwards ...

Well it was more the mandated PowerPoint presentation they had to sit through.

Anyone who's worked for a big corporation will know what I mean. "what the anti brbary course dint we do that 6 weeks ago "

Isn't the difference that most people are unlikely to be in any position where they can be bribed whereas in the military a lot more people use heavy equipment (for want of a better word)?

Its the same sort of repeat the same tick the box training - and woe betide you if you don't do it properly.

https://www.duffelblog.com/2017/12/soldiers-accidentally-sum...

All the Airforce personnel that I've drunk with tell me that a couple minutes on pure oxygen do wonders to clear up a hangover.

Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.

Drunkenness is mediated by alcohol dehydrogenase. Hangover is mediated by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.

As both of those use NAD+ as cofactors, something that may sober someone up faster without causing hangover symptoms is a combination of tryptophan and niacin, but only to the extent that NAD+ availability is a limiting factor in the liver. A dietary sufficiency of zinc is necessary for production of alcohol dehydrogenase. Experiments suggest that 1 g fructose/kg body mass also helps process alcohol faster, but I'm not clear on how, and the research has inconsistent reproducibility.

If you have a healthy diet already, and have a healthy liver, there is very little you can actually do to sober up faster, beyond building up a tolerance, which increases the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase your body produces when exposed to ethanol.

The pure oxygen may counteract some of the symptoms of drunkenness and hangover, but the health effects of hyperoxia can be even worse than ethanol intoxication. It would be less dangerous to intravenously infuse tryptophan and niacin-associated nicotinamides, or use direct hepatic injection, and even that sounds reckless.

One thing known to speed alcohol metabolization is fructose. That's not to say consuming fructose will make you "sober", though, as the first metabolic byproduct of alcohol - acetaldehyde - also has CNS effects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373

This is correct. And it is alcohol’s direct action in the brain that causes impairment.

Seems reasonable that oxygen should affect metabolic rates.

No, but the answer is too technical https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484320/ . Wikipedia is not very clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism

Short version of the paper (hopefully accurate enough):

The alcohol in the body is "burned" in a chain of multiple reactions. Using multiple steps because you can store the energy extracted in each step and store it in ATP or NADH to use it later in other reactions.

The first step is to extract two Hydrogen from the alcohol CH3-CH2-OH --> CH3-CH=O. This step needs an enzyme. There is not too much of this enzyme, so a small amount of alcohol saturates the maximum conversion capacity (that is ~7g/h). All the other steps have a better conversion rate, so this is the important step for alcohol metabolism.

Note that this step doesn't use oxygen. Oxygen is use in the step four and later. (I'm not sure if I'm counting all the steps correctly, but the use of oxygen is much later.)

Not enough to sober up in a matter of minutes.

It may wake you up a bit, you're still impaired relative to where you'd have been without the alcohol in your system (or lack of sleep or whatever other impairment is present).

Go-pills certainly increase tolerance to alcohol, won’t change your BAC but you’ll be less impaired after drinking, although it still isn’t safe and shouldn’t be an excuse for flying after drinking. This article is more about the opposite, though, sounds like the marines had some ambien left in their systems, and possibly motion sickness pills (Dramamine/Benadryl?), but they claim the levels were so low it shouldn’t have affected the pilots.

Overall I think the guy above boiled it down pretty well, some mistakes were made, but these marines were not prepared with enough training or properly functioning equipment to do the job safely, and senior commander’s are just pointing the blame at the squadron and middle management instead of taking ownership of the real problem (not responding to warnings about unpreparedness).

Why? We give oxygen to injured people because their lungs are impaired. But you can’t force more oxygen into the blood than it can carry, it just doesn’t work like that.

Our blood rarely carries all the oxygen it can. If its suddenly saturated, that means more oxygen throughout the body for metabolic purposes.

Uh, incorrect. Resting o2 sat is 99% in most young healthy people - like aviators. In older people, or the unhealthy, you may see it start to drop due to diffusion or ventilation defects - but barring serious lung disease, neuromuscular defects, severe, severe obesity, etc. that still gives you a resting sat in the mid 90s.

There is also oxygen dissolved directly in blood rather than saturating hemoglobin, but that constitutes a tiny fraction of o2 in comparison.

Please don’t make shit up.

So, breathing hard when exercising isn't a thing? Don't need more oxygen then vs resting? How can that all work?

-Oh, breathing hard when exercising is a thing, noone claimed otherwise. Your body requires more oxygen. You breathe harder. Heart rate increases to bring that oxygen to your muscles. That still does not oversaturate your blood with oxygen, though - only maintains saturation as consumption increases.

Bingo.

Sorry, meant to have a question mark on the end of that. Thanks for clarifying!

It also fucks up your blood pH which can have pretty nasty effects on body tissue.

Cause that "social drinking and bonding" was always binge drinking.

What do you mean by Binge?

"The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 grams percent or above. This typically happens when men consume 5 or more drinks or women consume 4 or more drinks in about 2 hours."

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm

Or in British Army terms a normal night out :-)

Hint: that’s the problem. People take drinking = binge drinking. Especially in the military.

This seems to be one of those cases where the special interest definition of a term and what the general population considers a reasonable definition diverge.

Killing anything less than a 6-pack is generally not considered binge drinking by the population at large. There's also an intent element. Binge drinking involves drinking to get drunk. Killing a 6-pack because you're sitting around with your buddies drinking and watching (edit: American) football is not binge drinking to anyone who isn't a card carrying member of MADD.

Well, a football match lasts over three hours, so chugging a six-pack over that time wouldn't fit the definition given above.

“Binge drinking” is a concept of its own, see for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge_drinking

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