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Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1934.
Soft Cover, 85 pages, 6x9.
Item #1692
PREFACE
The Congress of the United States by the enactment of the Cullen Bill on March 22, 1933, legalized the manufacture and sale of beverages, including beer, containing not to exceed 3.2 per centum of alcohol by weight. The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the sale of intoxicating liquors. The question was presented as to whether Congress by its enactment had legalized a beer which was intoxicating in fact. The question was raised in a number of states. The present investigation was undertaken with a view of determining whether beer having a 3.2 per cent alcoholic content by weight is in fact non-intoxicating.
For this purpose we included in the tests both men and women between the ages of 20 and 60, and with different habits as to consumption of alcoholic beverages. We made use of nearly all the now available quantitative methods for determining the action of alcohol on the human system to check our subjective judgment of the presence or absence of a state of intoxication in the subjects. It was deemed necessary, in some phases of the investigation, to resort to forced consumption of the beer, that is, to go beyond that quantity or rate of beer consumption which the subjects would have attained guided by their personal desire and comfort.
The University of Chicago accepted a grant from members of the United States Brewers Association to help defray the cost of the investigation, on the stipulation that conduct of the investigation and publication or non-publication of the results of the investigation is the sole concern of the University.
This investigation is concerned solely with the acute effects of the alcohol in this beer. There is a very good agreement between the results of all the objective investigations on the acute physiological and pharmacological effects on man and animals of alcohol in different quantities and concentrations. But there is much confusion in the social and legal conceptions of the state of alcoholic intoxication in man. We hope that the present study may be helpful toward a re-definition of alcoholic intoxication in its social and legal aspects.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A. Purpose of Experiment
B. Place of Present Experiments in Research on Alcohol
GENERAL TECHNIQUE
A. Beer
B. Analytic Method for Blood and Urine Alcohol
1. Introduction
2. The Determination of Alcohol in Blood, Urine, and Beer
C. Objective Performance Tests
1. Description of Tests
2. Reasons for the Selection of Tests
D. Observations on Behavior
EXPERIMENTAL WORK
A. Effects of Two and Four Bottles of 3.2 Per Cent Beer
1. Procedure
2. Preliminary Study
3. Results
B. Effects of Forced Consumption of 8-14 Bottles of 32 Per Cent Beer
1. Preliminary Study
2. Experimental Procedure
3. Results
C. Effects of 12-16 Bottles of 3.2 Per Cent Beer
1. Procedure
2. Results
3. Recapitulation of Results
DISCUSSION
A. Comparison of Results with Other Investigations
1. Blood and Urine Alcohol
2. Performance Tests
3. Behavior Observations
B. The Conception of Alcohol Intoxication
SUMMARY
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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