Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Drinking and Sex

Is alcohol abuse tied to risky sexual behavior? If so, and alcohol abuse is widespread, all the sex education you do is for naught, as people incapacitated by alcohol tend to do silly things with adverse consequences.

Ana Isabel Gil Lacruz, Marta Gil Lacruz and Juan Oliva Moreno use Spanish data to estimate the relationship between too much drinking and risky sex. While they cannot estimate the relationship directly, they find for indirect ways to do so. While each method can be criticized, they all point in the same direction: alcohol leads to risky sex. This shows that alcohol abuse prevention programs are particularly useful, as they have the side benefits of reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

In conclusion, be careful with the bottle during the end-of-year festivities, or you will end up with more headaches than a simple hangover.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All the alochol and sex education is for naught when one views what young people use to entertain themselves. Sex has been thrusted upon them in ways unimaginable in anytime in the past 50 years. American cable television and modern music has more to do with drinking and sexual mores than anything education can curtail. I hate to sound like my parent 35 years ago, but there are things that influence young people which are beyond an earlier generation influence or control.

Danny L. McDaniel
Lafayette, Indiana