Doc brief

Capacity for drink

As we have had ample occasion to note, alcohol plays a wide ranging role in human behaviour and affairs: there is an effect of disinhibition, a social lubricant easing pleasurable exchanges between individuals, but there could be unconsciousness and even death due to alcohol poisoning. In the range between, there may be varying levels of loss of capacity which depend not merely on the amount of alcohol consumed but on such factors as the age, sex and experience in alcohol of the consumer and even the circumstances in which the substance is being ingested.

These matters have come to the fore recently in the debate on the ability a woman has to consent to sexual intercourse, when apparently lacking capacity to do so as a result of excessive intake. The public debate at times appeared almost to suggest that in some quarters it was being mooted that the ability to consent or refuse should be linked to the amount of alcohol