spaco writes:

If the claim that one shot of everclear would kill you is true, why
then do many people imbibe 3 0r 4 mixed drinks that contain a couple
of shots of 80 proof alchohol each and live to tell about it? It
seems to take 20 or 30 shots of the 80 proof stuff to put the college
kids into their coffins.
Could it be that you can't just really need to take overall body
wieght into account, not just the amount of blood?

It does get more complex, and the rates are very important. Three or
four mixed drinks over the course of three or four hours is having the
alcohol metabolized as you're drinking it, and distributed over all
your body tissues ending up with much lower concentrations. Taking a
shot of everclear has all the alcohol in your stomach at once; if your
stomach was empty it's absorbed into your bloodstream pretty quickly,
and at that point you've got very high concentrations for a while.