Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget Read Free Page B

kissing that guy, but not who made the first move.
    Then there are
en bloc
blackouts, in which memory is totally disabled.
En bloc
blackouts were a specialty of mine. The light goes out and does not return for hours sometimes. I usually woke up from those blackouts on the safe shores of the next morning. The only exception was the night in Paris, when I zapped back to the world in that hotel room. I didn’t even know that could happen, one of the many reasons the night stayed with me so long.
    We may understand the basics of a blackout, but we still don’t understand the nuances and complications. Is there any territory more vast and unknowable than the human mind? Ask anyone who’s lost a parent to dementia or watched a spouse suffer a brain injury. What we remember, and how and why: This is a complex puzzle best explained by people in lab coats and not a girl who used to drink so much Dos Equis she would dip raw hot dogs in guacamole and shove them in her mouth.
    One of the people in lab coats is Aaron White, a leading expert on blackouts. White is the program director for college drinking research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and he dispelled some of my own confusion about blackouts. I always thought my blackouts were caused by specific types of liquors. (Brown liquor, in particular.) According to White, brown liquor doesn’t cause blackouts any more than clear liquor does. It’s not the type of drink you put to your lips, it’s the amount of alcohol in the blood and how quickly you get to that level. Fragmentary blackouts start at a blood-alcohol content around .20, while
en bloc
blackouts start around .30.
    White is accustomed to people’s ignorance about blackouts,because ours is a drinking culture disconnected from the dangers of alcohol. “If they were selling some drug at the gas station that shut down areas of your brain so that you were functioning with amnesia, we wouldn’t have it,” White says.
    Katy Perry had a hit song about a blackout in 2011. “It was a blacked-out blur,” she sang, “and I’m pretty sure it ruled.” But White sees blackouts another way. From a clinical perspective, he explains, a blackout is like early Alzheimer’s.
    The more I learned about blackouts, the more I wondered why I’d read so little about them. I’ve read magazine articles dissecting some drug of the moment—how ecstasy or meth or heroin hijacks the brain. I’ve read click-bait stories on what new drugs your teens might be using. Mothballs, bath salts. I’ve seen scare segments on roofies, like the one I saw on that talk show. And yet I’ve never read a major article or seen a television program discussing blackouts. It’s a menace hiding in plain sight.
    I discussed roofies with Aaron White. Roofies aren’t a myth, he said, but studies suggest the fear outpaces the incidence. Turns out, “being roofied” often doesn’t involve roofies at all. People just don’t realize how common it is to experience a blackout. And alcohol can have troubling interactions with prescription meds. Rohypnol is in the benzodiazepine family, often prescribed for anxiety and sleep disorders. Ativan, Xanax, Lunesta—some of the most popular meds on the market—can all create an amnesiac effect when combined with booze.
    My therapist was correct. Not everyone has blackouts. The majority of people will never have one in their lifetime. But blackouts are not rare in drinking circles. In fact, they’re common. A 2002 study published in the
Journal of American College Health
found that among drinkers at Duke University, more than half had experienced blackouts.
    I was particularly at risk, even though I didn’t realize it. Blackout drinkers tend to be the ones who hold their liquor. If you bolt to the toilet after your third cosmo, or start snoring after your second margarita, you won’t build up enough booze in your bloodstream to shut the machine down. I was so proud of the way I could knock