Drinking Too Much Alcohol Can Lead to Unsafe Sex
Knowing that certain things are linked is not the same as understanding how or why they are so. For example, it has been well-established that drinking alcohol has a direct bearing on the prevalence of unsafe sexual behavior. It is also known that unsafe or unprotected sex is a leading cause of HIV/AIDS.
What has been less certain has been how those cause-and-effect relationships work. Do thrill-seeking, risk-taking personalities drink more and therefore engage in unsafe sex? Or, is any personality under the influence of alcohol just as likely to make unwise decisions regarding sexual behaviors?
Researchers at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada conducted a large scale study intended to examine the extent of the cause and effect interplay between alcohol consumption and a person’s decision to engage in unprotected or unsafe sexual behavior. The study analyzed findings from 12 separate experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a group that would drink alcohol and a group which remained sober. The researchers followed these two groups and recorded (or measured) participants’ willingness to engage in unprotected sex.
It is not a newsflash that drinking alcohol negatively impacts a person’s decision-making ability. Plenty of studies have proven this to be the case – not to mention the anecdotal evidence any “man on the street” could provide. However, this may be the first study which measured how drinking alcohol impacts a person’s willingness to make risky decisions regarding sexual behavior.
The study’s findings show that for every .1mg/mL increase in a person’s blood alcohol content there is a five percent increase in the likelihood that the person will be willing to engage in risky sex. That translates to about four alcoholic beverages for a woman and five for a man. In short, the more alcohol a person drinks, the more willing they will be to participate in unsafe sex.
Certainly, seeing the correlation between alcohol and unprotected sex should impact programs designed to prevent HIV/AIDS. Since alcohol appears to play such a pivotal role in a person’s ill-judged sexual behavior, these programs would do well to include efforts to reduce over-consumption of alcohol. Alcohol education can play a major role in public health efforts aimed at HIV/AIDS reduction.
To say that alcohol increases the likelihood that a person will engage in unsafe or unprotected sexual behavior is not to alleviate the person of responsibility. People make choices about how much alcohol they will consume. However, being able to point to studies which demonstrate that over-consumption of alcohol leads directly to unwise and health-endangering decisions should underscore efforts aimed at eliminating preventable diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
