What is the TI re. alcohol lethality?

You may recall that in today's lecture I was asked what the TI for alcohol is and that I recommended to the student (James) to go and look it up. He did and sent me this (you will see that my general idea that a TI of 4 is not good enough for comfort is shared by the author of the site):


Dr. Baer, here is a link to some forums with information regarding thetherapeutic index of alcohol:
http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34430

Below is the direct quote from the website:

"From Pharmako/Poeia, a book I find myself often quoting these days:

Quote:
Ethanol, drinking alcohol, is far from harmless. Alcohol is a
protoplasmic poison. It kills bacteria, animals, and plants, even the
plant that produces it to begin with. The most effective concentration
for germicides is 140 proof, or 70 percent alcohol. This is the
concentration used in doctors offices as a disinfectant. Pure alcohol
is less effective, evidently because it gelatinizes the cellular walls
of the targeted microbes.

The toxicity of medicines and poisons is commonly expressed as the
LD50, the "lethal dose for 50 percent." Usually measured in grams per
kilogram of body weight, it signifies the amount of the substance
necessary to result in death for one-half of the unfortunate test
subjects. The relative safety or danger of a drug is denoted by its
therapeutic index, its margin of safety. The therapeutic index is the
ratio of the drug's LD50 to its effective dose, the dose necessary to
produce the desired effects. Since both the effective dose and the
LD50 are in grams per kilogram, the therapeutic index is a pure
number. The larger the therapeutic index, the safer the drug.

The therapeutic index of alcohol is only about five. That is, five
times the amount needed to get high can kill you. This puts alcohol,
as recreational drugs go, into the "highly dangerous" category. To
illustrate: if your child were going to overdose on a drug as part of
some rite of passage, say, turning twenty-one, would you rather he or
she overdose on alcohol or on marijuana? Either/or is not the point of
course. The point is that merely by drinking too much alcohol too
quickly, even once, you can die. Even cigarettes are safer than that."