But for all the times booze gets us in trouble, every now and then it acts like a trusty sidekick, coming in to help us out of potentially embarrassing and life-threatening situations in ways we never thought possible.

Let's be clear: Alcoholism will kill you dead. Drunk driving will kill you, and probably multiple children along the way. There are no medical benefits to chronic drunkenness.

6 In Some Cases, Alcohol Makes You Invincible

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After the fourth or fifth round of drinks, it's not unusual to see some idiot stand up in the middle of the bar and announce how heroically tough he is and demand that you dare him to jump through a plate glass window. A 22-year-old Russian man named Alexei Roskov, however, decided to dare himself and jumped out of his kitchen window after guzzling three entire bottles of vodka. This was a particularly bad idea since he lived on the fifth floor of his apartment building.

Not only did he not splat messily into the sidewalk like an alcohol-soaked sponge, but to his wife's relief and his own drunken amusement, he wasn't hurt. At all. He just got up, brushed himself off and staggered back upstairs, where his wife was on the phone calling him an ambulance. Not wanting to hang around and listen to her lecture him about how his comically impaired sense of judgment had nearly cost him his life, he jumped out of the window again.

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The paramedics that arrived on the scene where baffled to find that Alexei had only a few cuts and bruises after diving from his apartment twice in a row and presumably punched him in the damn face for wasting their time.

In a pattern we'll be seeing throughout this article, the reason Alexei didn't explode into the sidewalk like a mayonnaise jar full of hamburger meat was the same thing that caused his dumbass to try it in the first place: the vodka. A drunk central nervous system is numb, causing the muscles in the body to relax. Then, the same drunken reflexes that make people more likely to park their car in the produce section of your grocery store made Alexei's body less likely to tense up in anticipation of the impact, which it turns out can save your limbs from snapping like twigs.

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So in a sense his rampaging alcoholism saved his life despite pushing him from the ledge in the first place, sort of like when Riggs handcuffs that guy and jumps off the building in Lethal Weapon.

"Relax, this is totally going to work."