Time to lower the blood alcohol limit
Hundreds of lives could be saved overnight
Ican’ t hold my l i quor any more. Or, to be purely scientific, with 80 milligrams of alcohol streaming through every 100 millilitres of my blood — the legal limit for driving a motor vehicle throughout our nation — I am simply not fit to operate, as they say, heavy machinery.
Maybe I never could. Maybe all those university stories I like to regale about chugging this or downing that are just that — stories. Or maybe I was just way more impaired than I remember, time not diminishing how much I had to drink but rather how coherent I thought I was. All that I know is that I am not fit to drive at anywhere near 80 mg.
More importantly, I don’t think you are either.
The reason I know this is that, in the interest of a purely objective analysis of the subject of drinking and driving, I’ve been measuring my blood alcohol content for the past year ( yes, with the infrequency of my tippling these days, it took me a whole 12 months to get anything close to a statistical probability). Factoring out inevitable side effects — the spilling of many an ice tray, sleeping on bathroom floors, I could go on — it became painfully evident that we’d all be better served if the national blood alcohol content (BAC) limit was lowered to 50 mg.
Yeah, yeah, I know you’re a manly man and think you can pound ’ em back without serious side effect. Unfortunately for your anecdotal experience, science is not on your side; pretty much every recent study concludes that 50 mg per 100 ml of blood would be a better demarcation between impaired and sober. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) will no doubt pen me poison letters when I point out that numerous studies — including the granddaddy of them all, by Robert F. Borkenstein, the inventor of the breathalyzer — reveal that drivers with between 10 and 40 mg of alcohol in their blood actually have fewer accidents. But everyone agrees that once you hit 50 mg, you are impaired to some degree. Your inability to take proper care and control takes another, more dramatic, spike at 80 mg and, by the time you hit 150 mg per 100 ml of blood, studies show that you’re anywhere between 10 and 25 times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.
Not everyone would welcome lower standards, their resistance usually hinging on the statistic that most driving-under-the- influence fatalities come from those blowing 150 mg and higher ( 70 per cent and rising). Lowering the limits, so goes the logic, might not save significantly more lives.
Proponents counter that there might be another fiveto seven- per- cent reduction in alcohol- related vehicular fatalities (as many as 700 lives saved in the United States, according to the latest stats) if 50 mg were adopted as the new legal limit. Especially since, just like speed- limit enforcement, there seems to be something of a fudge factor built into the policing of drunk driving. Indeed, if you’re taken to the police station for official Intoxilyzer testing after the initial roadside screening, chances are you’ve blown way over 80 mg.
Everyone I contacted for this story — from DUI- specialist defence attorneys to the constabulary policing our roads for drunk drivers — concurred that few of these initial roadside screening tests are set at 80 milligrams. Indeed, many jurisdictions won’t start official legal proceedings to charge you with having a BAC over 80 mg unless you blow 100 on the roadside test.
The reason is that the roadside screening devices do just that — screen — and the results are not legally admissible. Court- approved Intoxilyzer testing is almost always performed at the police station and, since your blood alcohol content can drop by as much as 20 mg in an hour, the constabulary prefer the higher initial screening so you still blow over 80 back at the cop shop. It makes conviction easier. Oh, there is a formula that allows prosecutors to extrapolate to show that you were over the legal limit when stopped, but most enforcement personnel would prefer a cut-and-dried case of exceeding the 80-mg limit under proscribed testing.
Many provinces ( including Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, but not Quebec), now impose warnings and even licence suspensions if your BAC is as low as 50 mg (40 mg in Saskatchewan). Ontario drivers, as an example, can see their driver’s licence suspended for three days if they are found with between 50 and 80 mg of alcohol in their blood. Ditto for Alberta. However, these administrative sanctions do not automatically result in criminal proceedings.
In other words, there’s a grey zone between 50 and 80 mg ( 100 if you consider those aforementioned roadside-screening tests) where the police consider you impaired enough to stop you from driving but won’t actually charge you with blowing over 80.
For those using that grey zone as justification to have one more for the road, it’s worth noting one very important loss in motor skills. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the one important change in your ability to operate a motor vehicle that occurs between 50 and 80 mg is a “reduced response to emergency driving situations.” That intermediate level of alcohol content may not impair your ability to perform simple tasks, but it leaves you woefully unprepared for the unexpected. In other words, throw in an unexpected pedestrian or a ne’er- do- well running a red light and you’ll be too slow to react.
I suspect that this is where that tired old cliché of “holding your liquor” comes from. With between 50 and 80 mg of alcohol in your bloodstream, you may indeed be able to navigate your way home safely if there are absolutely no extraordinary circumstances. But I think you would be a complete ass-hat for trying.
I know you’re a manly man and think you can pound ’em back without effect