IMO the important thing is not the quantitative figure in numerical terms of how many drinks someone consumes, but their behavior after consuming the alcohol.
Fr.ex I've seen people come out of a bar and leg it after me screaming something about niggers and baying for blood (their words, and my blood, respectively) Hadn't drunk anything, or been in the bar myself. Yet I can sink a half pint of vodka easily, probably a pint, although I generally measure it by the coffee mug, rather than use a pint glass. So measurements are an estimate, without getting rowdy, bawdy, nasty. Yeah, it has some chance of perhaps making me slur my speech a bit, or if I go lie down in the dark afterwards, probably end up going to sleep, but thats the worst of anything I do under the influence of booze. Go to sleep, or slur speech if I'm really, really pissed.
If I was drinking shots, chances are people at a party if they were judging by the number of doubles rather than the state of drunkenness, or acts of the drunk person, most of them wouldn't be in a fit state to remember it afterwards by the time I got drunk. I don't drink very often, but (despite its interaction with alcohol) my use of chlormethiazole as an anticonvulsant has given me a preeeeety hefty ability to pack down the drinks if I were inclined to do so and use those measly pub measures. Shit I'd probably bankrupt myself if I had to get drunk on booze from a bar, its so damn expensive these days here, at least if you choose to pay taxes on the alcohol you drink, if you drink any at all. But it takes me a couple of coffee mugs full of vodka, dark rum etc. or the equivalent of about a quarter to a third of a teacup of ethanol, diluted down afterwards to a suitable concentration to be able to be consumed (although that much EtOH, that'll fuck me up pretty thoroughly and its right to sleep I go. Which is typically the only reason I'll drink. If I REALLY cannot sleep, and nitrazepam won't do the trick (as with most nitro-substituted benzodiazepines, nitrazepam is a pretty heavy hitter, long lasting and potent, 1 5mg tablet, probably half would put most down for the count, but I get occasional bouts of the most infernal insomnia where I've had my antiseizure meds, so don't drink huge amounts, and (knowing beforehand, after slowly working up doses to obtain said knowledge rather than jumping in at the deep end of course) even a fucking 70mg dose of nitrazepam won't down me, AFTER I've had the chlormethiazole. That shouldn't happen, indeed it'd kill most people), and I don't have enough of an opioid to sedate myself satisfactorily, AND I'm out of ether, then I'll resort to alcohol, as a once in a blue moon ghetto sedative, but generally i don't get drunk when I drink, nor do I seek to. I won't say no to a frosty pint on a hot summers day though, or if I'm thirsty. But I tend to view active levels of alcohol as more of a primitive, if fairly effective last resort when all else either fails or is unavailable, a tool to get a job done rather than a euphoriant. The job being to sleep for a few hours at least, when its just one of those total fucks of nights or days where sleep is impossible, and especially if I'm already shattered from say, working for ages in the lab, sometimes the only way to go is southwards. Rear end, meet sofa, sofa, meet my back, the rear end'll make the introductions for me, because in a few minutes, I'm not going to be here for a while
)
I've never been easy to put out, outside a surgical general anaesthesia context. Even before taking the anticonvulsant, its been hard as hell to actually get me to sleep at times. Opioids tend to be the most effective way to do it, outside a theater setting, and don't come with a filthy hangover like a large amount of booze. So for intractable insomnia nights, that tends to be my go-to. The standard GABAa-ergics like benzos take more than any doc would ever prescribe knowingly, to the point where an excessive sized script, intended for 10mg nitrazepam daily, although never, ever taken daily even for a week, will, if I am lucky, get me two nights of sleep if I divide the script in half, one half of it per night. (or day, depending on whether or not my squirrelyarsed autie sleep cycle (if the word 'cycle' applies at all, which is somewhat debatable at best), if I'm really lucky I can split it into thirds, but more often its either two days/nights of sleep, or one. IF it will do the job at all.
Some people seem to think being a hard-head in that respect is something to boast of. I, rather, being on the recipient end of it, see it as more of a curse, because it makes sedating myself both difficult to accomplish with traditional sleeping pills, and damnably uneconomical for a chronic pain patient to need to resort to an opioid in a one-shot significantly increased dosage. Just takes up resources. Its not a bloody blessing, or a source of pride. Its a bloody pain in the arse and a source of resource-drain on pain meds I need to damn walk, or lie down, sit down or anything else involving anything from the hips down that doesn't involve my dick or my arse.
When its not 'jesus how are you still sober' but 'how the blue furry chittering fuck on a hotdog bun have you managed to not only survive, but to remain conscious in the process' that gets really old, really damn quickly. I've given at least one anaesthetist a run for his money, too, getting decidedly funny looks when I asked him to stop poking me with the fucking needles and let me have a crack at it (he didn't, unfortunately, but they did manage, with a combination of alfentanil, some gaseous fluorinated ether anaesthetic via inhalation, sevoflurane, I'd guess going from the taste, and what, going from the color, might have been propofol. THAT did it.) But not before 20 minutes to a half hour at least of being made a fucking pincushion, to the point of starting to get pretty irate about being repeatedly stabbed with needles to the point that, were they left in me, I'd look like a fucking inside out hedgehog. Thats not fun at all, I can tolerate an injection, fine enough, and even stomach somebody else doing it if I have to, I'm not squeamish, not at all.
BUT...being repurposed as a dart-board, that on the other hand is something I am not prepared to tolerate. Wasn't particularly pleased about them sending me home with a cannula still in my vein either (I took it out myself, didn't feel it at the time, presumably they used a local on the area whilst I was under, although I did leave it in overnight, since afterall they already had done just that when I was in the hospital, since that way, with it already in place, no needle tip required, and a simple syringe, other than to draw up a solution of dipropionylmorphine and some 3-fluorophenmetrazine (never had phenmetrazine itself, but its a dopamine reuptake inhibitor type stimulant, used in the days of the (and very popular with, apparently) band The Beatles, before being withdrawn from the range of prescribable stimulant medications available in this, and many other countries, due to the reported staggeringly euphoric nature of preludin. Never tried it, before my time, at least unless I ever were to decide to make some myself I never will get to try it, but I have tried the 3-fluorinated derivative, and it blows (pun intended) even the finest, most carefully recrystallized and solvent-cleaned, intravenous cocaine hydrochloride, turned from street stuff to something that matches the melting point sharp in a microcapillary tube, and checks out, when one recovers whats left after removing all the cuts, even blow light that, gets blown outa the water, by 3-fluorophenmetrazine, and a mixture of that with the dipropionyl ester version of diamorphine, with most certainly never any cut to begin with through that cannula, lets just say, that proved an appetizer fit for a king wishing for his breakfast to be served on a solid 24-carat gold plate and marched to him down a red carpet by the finest culinary artists to be found within an empire. less of a dopaminergic shot to the head, but an IR laser and GPS-guided heatseeker surface-to-air smart-weapon hitting with sub-micrometer precision right to the tastiest places of the Nucleus Accumbens to have poked.
I was, needless to say, in a much better mood about the left-in cannula from the surgery after I woke up next morning at home, where I could get a decent bloody breakfast to eat in the morning rather than something that the cat might well have sicked up after being tube-fed with it due to resistance on the part of the feline in question to consume such a limp, soggy slab of unidentifiable effluent as had been presented me in hospital, ostensibly as, if not food, then something consumable to provide the body with nutriment. That, and of course the freedom to stick on a mudvayne album, set the track to 'death blooms' (I love that song, the guitar and bass kick arses) and crank it up until my eyeballs are fit to rattle in their sockets in time with the house walls vibrating, was immensely satisfying after being cooped up in that pest-riddled shit receptacle for the most part of a week with only a large selection of scientific literature, a laptop so as neither to pay extortion racket fees for internet access for a day which would buy you a month' broadband five or six times over if paid for more than one day; or to be expected to do so for censored bloody internet access that screened out my email, and my favourite clan.chem forum, as well as pretty much everything else that wasn't pre-chewed (and probably predigested by an infant, albeit reluctantly on the part of the unfortunate infant in question). So I at least made sure to bring my laptop, and crack the rudimentary parental controls, along with tapping into their wireless network for free. And bring a pair of good headphones with a built-in amplifier for music.
But, still, hospital food and internet looks even more sickly than your average prepubescent chemo patient with a nasty dose of the flu at the same time as their cisplatin and mustard gas (considered some of the rougher cancer therapies by a fairly wide margin as I have been led to believe, and yeah, they actually do sometimes use nitrogen mustards, including one of the HN1/2/3 series nitrogen mustards originally developed as battlefield blister agent chemical weapons. Albeit that particular drug is somewhat old these days, nitrogen mustards are still used in chemo, including some like modified oestrogen-mustard (estramustine, IIRC thats called) hybrid hormone/nitrogen mustard agent type stuff for treating some endocrine or oestrogen-sensitive cancers), and I can well believe being shot up with a measured dose of something originally intended for blinding, killing and horribly maiming on the battlefield in combination with well-known gutbusters amongst chemo meds would be pretty shitty for the recipient, even when used to do good)
ponds from now on.