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I just want to point out the amazing amount of alcohol you'd have to ingest in a short time to get to the 1% BAC referenced in this article. Obviously there ar

• MaximumYComb 5y ago
  About 10 years ago I called an ambulance for a friend at a party. Everyone had said just to get a taxi for him, so I did. When the taxi arrived I realised I couldn't put him in it and called an ambulance instead. He had seizures on the way to the hosptial, and was blood tested at 0.7% BAC. He woke up 12 hours later and was still 0.2% BAC (which is really drunk).
  • vorpalhex 5y ago
    Good on you for recognizing it as an emergency and responding appropriately.
    • silexia 5y ago
      I had a similar situation in a college dorm at age 18. My friend didn't want to get in trouble so just tried to babysit me. I had severe alcohol poisoning and was sick for days. I am still good friends with that guy, but have realized I need to say no to him quite a bit.
      • taternuts 5y ago
        Honestly if you are in America, he _might_ have done you a favor as the emergency ride to the hospital costs about 5k (not great for college students), let alone the medical bill. It's always better safe than sorry though.
        • markdown 5y ago
          That's insane. Does the St. John Ambulance Brigade not operate in the US? T hey provide free services in many countries and have for decades. Perhaps the third world needs to send an aid mission to the US. https://www.stjohninternational.org/ https://www.stjohninternational.org/
• nkozyra 5y ago
  The logistics of that got me thinking if there was perhaps instrumentation errors that led to that BAC number. It seems implausible, and not data-centric enough to hang your hat on in a blog post like this.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Depending on the incentive situation instrumentation errors may be the norm and not the exception. The NJ state police got in trouble for that in the past few years. If the calibration error isn't linear and someone shows up blowing a high number you could get a medically insane number on the screen.
• cromulent 5y ago
  Some of these are interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#Highest_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#Highest_... I think anyone who has played with a personal breath test device knows that you can get false readings quite easily, but blood tests are something else altogether.
  • RandallBrown 5y ago
    I have a police officer friend and even his breathalyzer gives pretty dramatically different readings.
    • aerostable_slug 5y ago
      The unspoken secret to DUI defense: pay $10k for an expert witness to show up and demand access to the breathalyzer's source code and pertinent documentation. The vendor will refuse and the case will be thrown out. Nobody wants to talk about the (in)accuracy of breathalyzers.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        >Nobody wants to talk about the (in)accuracy of breathalyzers. That's because like every other bit of tech used to convict people it's designed to err on the side of convicting people not being accurate. If you want a laugh look up the sensors they use in the alcohol ankle bracelets. Then look up the OEM specs, calibration requirements, usage environment requirements and accuracy claims by the vendors and try and reconcile the two (several research papers have been written about this). The whole industry is lousy.
      • outworlder 5y ago
        > The vendor will refuse and the case will be thrown out. I'm skeptical that a case would be thrown out that easily. I have seen expert witnesses getting chewed by the prosecution on minor details. So what if the source is unavailable. It can be argued that the device is tested and regularly calibrated, and that any inaccuracies found will be minor - and certainly not enough to exonerate the defendant. Yeah maybe there might be some inaccuracy - but then the defendant failed the standardized field sobriety tests. And the cop is saying that they were visibly drunk. Now what?
• rvense 5y ago
  I have just under ten years of AA (and sobriety) under my belt, so I have heard a lot of war stories. I can't remember ever hearing anyone claim more than about 0.65% BAC. 1% sounds more than a little extreme.
  • MivLives 5y ago
    Most normal people pass out at around .2, so the fact this person could turn a car key is crazy.
    • pengaru 5y ago
      If you're pounding shots in a drinking game or just hitting the Economy-sized bottle of Bacardi rum directly, it's fairly easy to create a situation where you've gotten behind the wheel buzzed and it all catches up to once you're in motion.
      • ksdale 5y ago
        You'd have to literally take those shots and go out to your car in the next few minutes to get surprised like that, which... I guess people would do, but it's not that easy. Pounding shots catches up with you very quickly.
        • pengaru 5y ago
          I've definitely had experiences where I managed to queue up a profound amount of alcohol intoxication, becoming realized abruptly after enough time had passed to switch bars on foot. In one specific instance, I promptly became incapacitated before even receiving my first drink at the new bar, falling off a bar stool and vomiting on the floor, unable to stand again, let alone walk. The bar-tender was convinced I was overdosing on some hard drug apparently and kicked us all out for being junkies, because I went from walking in perfectly normal and ordering a drink, to this complete disaster on the floor, in the time it took her to prepare our drinks... It must have been a 10-20 minute delay spent between bars on foot that time. The first bar specialized in stiff sweet cocktails, where they mask stupidly high alcohol content with sugary syrup. IIRC it was called Sugar Lounge (in SF). And I have very low tolerance not being much of a drinker, if you've got tolerance I imagine you can push that time-to-incapacitated delay out quite a bit.
• dexwiz 5y ago
  You have never seen an alcoholic chug liquor like its water I take it? Long term alcoholics, talking decades+ here not youthful overindulgence, become incredibly tolerant and can consume huge amounts in ways that would make a normal person wretch. These are people who have altered their body chemistry enough that withdrawal is deadly.
  • thebean11 5y ago
    Two bottles in an hour though? I was under the impression that the most hardcore alcoholics consumed that much in a day.
    • zepolen 5y ago
      I've seen an alcoholic down half a bottle of whiskey for breakfast. Literally.
    • jessriedel 5y ago
      My understanding is that serious alcoholics are drunks for days at a time. They go to bed with enough alcohol in their system to be drunk when they wake up, and they keep drinking throughout the day. Having zero alcohol in their system can be life threatening. That means they can build up to whatever BAC slowly.
    • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      In the mid 90s, I worked for a grocery store doing full time, overnight stock to partially pay for college. One of my co-workers for a period of time, whose name I now forget, was a barely-functional alcoholic. He would show up to work on time most days, and work through his shift. At lunchtime he would disappear for a period of time and he would come back smelling like Listerine. Because that was his lunch. A bottle of Listerine. During the holidays they shifted some of us to a morning shift to continue to put items on shelves to match the holiday demand, and I saw him walk in on his day off, grab a fifth of bourbon and a fifth of vodka in the cheap plastic bottles, walk out, and walk back in about an hour later because he had consumed both bottles in his truck in the parking lot. He wanted a couple more to bring back to his apartment. And as bad as his drinking was, the reason he had sole custody of his daughter is because his ex-girlfriend was a full blown drug addict and he was good at hiding his drinking from CPS.
• MivLives 5y ago
  I was always told that you eliminate roughly one drink per hour from your system. So it is possible that they did that feat over a longer time span. Staying up all night drinking then hopping in the car seems much more reasonable (at least for how to achieve that BAC, and not as a decision you should make in life).
  • mcguire 5y ago
    Eliminating alcohol from your system reduces your BAC. One drink plus one hour ought to give you (fairly close to) a 0% BAC.
• retrac 5y ago
  It's truly incredible. 0.15% is quite drunk for a typical person and most can't stand at 0.2%. At > 0.3% people often require hospitalization. At 1% it's probably over the LD50 for an alcohol-naive person! Though it seems estimates for that value are rather fuzzy.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >It's truly incredible. 0.15% is quite drunk for a typical person and most can't stand at 0.2%. At > 0.3% people often require hospitalization Unless you're using insanely puritanical definitions for "quite drunk" and "can't stand" this doesn't check out. One drink is ~0.02 and there's no shortage of college kids will kill 10+ in an hour with no effect other than becoming drunk and a headache the next day.
    • bandyaboot 5y ago
      Binge drinking college students aren't "typical [people]"
    • morsch 5y ago
      College kids who routinely have 10+ drinks in an hour probably aren't what the GP had in mind when referring to typical persons. Obviously words like typical on the one hand and puritanical on the other hand are sort of subjective. The NIH, probably on the more puritanical side, considers more than 4-5 drinks on one occasion (not per hour!) as binge drinking[1], or more precisely any drinking that raises BAC beyond 0.08%. As for typical, some random internet page[2] claims that on average, male college students have 9 drinks per week (not per hour!). [1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/college-drinking https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh... [2] https://www.scramsystems.com/blog/2014/02/infographic-much-college-students-drink/ https://www.scramsystems.com/blog/2014/02/infographic-much-c...
    • retrac 5y ago
      I'm going by my own experiences. And I don't think I'm puritanical at all, but I am something of a lightweight with alcohol admittedly. I am male and I am a half-recovered alcoholic, for context. Around 0.05 I'm tipsy to the point of it being obvious. Feeling good, effusive. And if I'm smart I'll stop drinking around here. At 0.10 I'm flushed, joyous or melancholic, coordination is affected, I might slosh my drink on the table, and I'm going on and maybe making a bit of a fool of myself. I tend to want to go to bed shortly after. I won't have a bad hangover if I eat a good meal but yes, that's quite drunk in my opinion. And at like 0.15+, I get very sedated. I tend to pass out and while it's not a stupor I am hard to rouse. Above that is just passed out black-out drunk and I've only done that a few times thankfully, but I have, so I know that most of a bottle of 750 ml of 80 proof on an empty stomach is enough to potentially hospitalize me, and certainly leave me passed out in a puddle of vomit. These numbers being for when I am alcohol naive. Not having drunk in months. If I have been drinking regularly you could easily double or triple the numbers. Most people do not have alcohol tolerance though, which is why I assumed an alcohol-naive drinker.
• erikstarck 5y ago
  Andre the Giant level of consumption.
  • spicybright 5y ago
    Maybe even 2 Andres. 1% is insane.
• bandyaboot 5y ago
  Part of it likely has to do with the fact that alcoholics' livers are often dysfunctional, so the .02% average wouldn't necessarily apply to the types of people who can reach 1% BAC.
• foolfoolz 5y ago
  0.02% BAC per drink is wildly underestimated. many people will reach the driving limit of .08 after 2 drinks there’s a chart on this dmv page that shows you have to be 240lbs to get .02 per drink https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/alcohol-and-drugs/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Considering the rate of obesity, .02 per drink might be more common than one would think. That said, people should calculate it for themselves than use rules of thumb. I'm not convinced of the values in that table. I think they are being very conservative. My calculations using a BAC formula are different. For example, the .02 per drink seems to work for men weighing 215lbs.
    • vkou 5y ago
      Do note: There's a lot of beer these days that's >5% alcohol, so a single beer often has more than one drink.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        Yeah. Standard drinks are 1.5oz 80 proof, 12 oz 5% beer, or 5oz 12% wine.
        • brewdad 5y ago
          I go by a "rule of 60". A pint of 7% beer (very common with IPAs) would worth 7*16 = 112 points or almost 2 "drinks".
          • arthurcolle 5y ago
            How drunk were you when you came up with this? Clever
      • 0des 5y ago
• tdrdt 5y ago
  The list on Wikipedia is crazy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content (Highest levels)
• _notreallyme_ 5y ago
  He didn't start at 0% BAC, otherwise he would likely be experiencing delirium tremens. Alcoholics tend to maintain a high BAC all the time, enough so that even after sleeping they still have enough alcohol in their blood to avoid delirium tremens. So he probably drank much less than two hard liquor bottles.