Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009
Calculating Blood Alcohol Level is Sobering
It was September 28, 1989, and I was getting my North Carolina drivers license renewed. An old high-school friend tagged along to renew his license, too. I know it’s really, really, hard to believe this, but I can’t take a good photo. After standing in front of the blue backdrop and suffering the flash bulb, the mugshot on my license featured arched eyebrows, drowsy eyes, a non-committal smirk, and a hair style of thick curls that quickly explain why the popular metal bands of the 1980s had to go away.
My friend and I compared licenses as we walked to our cars.
“Burch,” he said, studying the odd expression in my photo. “You look drunk.”
“I know,” I said. “If I ever get pulled, I’ll just be like, ‘I’m not drunk, officer. I always look like this. See?’”
It was just a joke.
But like most jokes, the reality behind that one isn’t so funny, considering a Myrtle Beach Police captain and a Coastal Carolina University coach were recently arrested in separate incidents on charges of driving while impaired or driving under the influence. The arrests happened on the same day.
The DUI charges against these two high-profile figures, both mentioned in local news media reports, made me wonder if too many drivers guess at their blood alcohol level and decide to drive when they should not. And what if, unlike me, they actually look sober in the photo on their drivers’ licenses?
Most people feel fairly safe driving after a pint of regular beer or a glass of wine with dinner at a restaurant. But what if you’re in a group, and finishing a bottle means everyone gets another half-glass of wine? What if you’re a big guy (like me) and have two pints instead of just one?
The guesswork begins during the walk to the car. Will you make it home, or spend the evening at J. Reuben Long Detention Center?
Next time, instead of spontaneous guesswork, you might try some advanced calculations to figure out how closer you’re getting to the legal limit of 0.08 percent blood alcohol content, a limit now adopted by all states.
The University of Okaloma Police Department has an online blood alcohol content calculator
( www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm).
The calculator’s figures are estimates, because people have different burn-off rates for alcohol, depending on whether they are male or female, what types of metabolisms they have, and how much food is in their stomachs.
Let’s say you have that second glass of wine, measured at five ounces per glass, within an hour of the first one.
If you weigh 160 pounds, your blood alcohol content will be around 0.02 percent, according to the Sooner PD calculator. At 100 pounds, you’re at 0.04 percent.
It’s a helpful generalization, but the available online calculators sometimes come up with different results.
The Sooner calculator doesn’t allow the user to indicate male or female. Another calculator I looked at, called The Original Blood Alcohol Calculator (http://bloodalcoholcalculator.org/), included a choice of male or female, but did not include a measurement for the amount wine, beer, or cocktail.
When I used The Original calculator, two glasses of wine, consumed in an hour, put a 100-pound woman at 0.074 percent, within a sip of becoming illegal to drive. The Original also placed a 160-man a little higher than the Sooner calculator, but still legal, at 0.034 percent.
The idea behind the calculators is not to challenge fate, but instead to make reasonable decisions about drinking.
Of course, if you're younger than 21 and on the road with any blood alcohol content, you're risking big trouble.
When in doubt, consider: a cab is cheaper than a lawyer.
And we all know those cabbies need the cash more than the lawyers.
Contact Colin Burch - the Beerman - at beerpour@yahoo.com or visit his beer blog at http://maltyhops.blogspot.com
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