Resources | There is no safe limit to stay out of jail if you must just drink one |
| Sunday, 31 December 2006 | |
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From a good time to a crime Once upon a time, people laughed when you joked that you were too drunk to walk, so you had to drive. But then, once upon a time the Marlboro Man was the ultimate sign of virility. The Marlboro Man died of cancer. And drunken drivers long ago ceased to be funny. Indeed, social attitudes toward drunken driving are about where attitudes toward smoking were 20 years ago - hardening fast. Think of that next time you’re in a smoke-free bar. And think of that tonight if you are one of the thousands raising a toast to the New Year in Tampa Bay. For more information on DUI lawyers in Georgia click here. Amid all of the resolutions and revelry, more than 400 Floridians will start a clock tonight on a time they will wish they could forget. They’re about to get hit with a DUI. If you drink at all and drive, the closer you come to the legal limit, the less you’re able to discern your growing impairment. This is where the insidious nature of alcohol meets the bright black and white line of the law. One minute you’re at the line. The next, you’re over, and in big trouble. Florida, and society at large, is getting tougher on drunken drivers. If this weekend looks anything like the last three New Year’s holidays, we can expect nearly one in five of those 400-plus arrests to be made in Pinellas or Hillsborough counties. This isn’t sensationalism. It’s simple math. Based on the last few years, we can surmise that more than a few dozen people are going to end up tonight in the Pinellas County Jail because they had something to drink and got behind the wheel of a vehicle. Nearly four dozen more will spend the wee hours of the new year in a Hillsborough County jail. Most of these folks will have never had a DUI before. The vast majority will be men. Most of them won’t even come close to what you’d consider a “sloppy drunk.” They won’t be weaving all over the road. They’re just people who are out having fun. They’ll have a few drinks. And drive. They’ll be stopped. They’ll be tested. And ultimately, they’ll spend the night in jail. A New Year’s they’ll never forget. Florida will close in on 70,000 DUI arrests this year. A low threshold In Florida today, the “bar” for pulling you over is low. The consequences for getting caught are high. And police are working harder than ever to find and arrest those who drive over the limit. Sure, they’ll pull over anybody who’s weaving all over the road. But police in the greater Tampa Bay area will be looking for any possible violation of law - however minor - as an opportunity to pull you over and check you out. Headlight out? Taillight out? Music too loud? Do you have something hanging from your rear-view mirror? These are just some of the most minor infractions that can lawfully lead to a simple stop that heads south for you - if they suspect you’re over the limit. Flem Whited, a lawyer who has worked more than 11,000 Florida DUI cases in the last 27 years, says he’s come to the conclusion it’s pretty hard to drive anywhere and be in compliance with every law in the state. The police will be spread out everywhere this weekend. Ronald Harrison, who runs Operation 3D (Don’t Drink & Drive) for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, says checkpoints are considered less effective on a weekend like this because the problem is so widespread. The answer for law enforcers, he says, is to spread themselves out in search of drivers who are over the limit. The big problem for you and me - as citizens who might want to follow the law and who definitely don’t want to be picked up for drunken driving - is knowing when we’ve crossed that “invisible” line. The line itself is very real (measured to 0.001 percent). But for those of us who might have a few drinks over the course of an evening, there’s little or no way of knowing when we hit it. Most of us don’t have our own breathalyzers (although there’s clearly a market for these devices). Even if you own one, you have no way of knowing if it’s calibrated correctly. In an effort to get to this question of “How do you know when you’re legally too drunk to drive?” we threw a preholiday party in Minneapolis. We wanted to see how well people might know when they cross this invisible line. I invited a couple dozen friends, many of them radio and TV personalities in the Twin Cities area, to my home - along with a half-dozen members of the sheriff’s department and the state patrol. The police brought the bartenders who measured every pour. And as the night went on, they measured the alcohol content of every drinker. Drink No. 3 The party started at 7 p.m. By shortly after 8, almost everyone was on drink No. 3. Bartenders have told me to plan on guests having three drinks in the first hour and one every hour after that. Guests were asked to flag an officer when they thought they might be close to 0.08. Nobody was required to drink to that level. And nobody had to stop when they got there. It was designed to be a party like any other (save all those uniformed officers). The big difference here is that nobody would be allowed to leave without a designated driver. And everybody would leave knowing just how much alcohol was in their system. The results were fascinating. Among the first people tested was Lee Valsvic, a 46-year-old woman of average height and build. She had a full meal before coming to the party. In a little more than an hour, she’d consumed three glasses of wine. The pours were liberal - 8 ounces - technically twice the “standard serving” of a glass of wine. But the size of those servings didn’t look any different from what you might normally be served at a party. The real difference here is that they were measured. Valsvic was among the first to make her way out of the main party area to a second bar where police were administering breathalyzer tests. “Right now, where I am, I would definitely stop (drinking),” she said. “There’s no way I would do anymore.” An officer asked her, “What do you mean stop, though - would you drive?” She told him no, not after three glasses of wine. All guests were encouraged to come to this second bar when they thought they might be close to 0.08. But they’d have nothing to base that on, really, and that’s kind of the point. “I’m so glad it’s in Rick’s basement,” Valsvic said, “and not on the side of the road.” Most people know when they feel more or less in control, but putting that in the context of 0.08 can be a different thing. There was a rush of guests to guess what she might blow on the machine. One guessed 0.05, another 0.07. The highest number someone shouted out was 0.09, which Valsvic quickly discounted as too high. She blew 0.104. In a moment of complete shock, Valsvic said she had to stop participation altogether. It became, for her, a surprising and emotional moment. She told us later that not only was she caught off guard by the result, but she found herself immediately dealing with the reality that her own mother was killed by a drunken driver just five years ago. The confluence of her own emotions and her personal history became more than she could handle. And the reality is, her blood alcohol was still on the rise. We know that because, on average, a person naturally burns off about 0.015 percent (one standard serving of alcohol) each hour after the body stops absorbing alcohol. When she retested, about an hour later, she was still at 0.099. Down just slightly. Over the limit In fact, she remained over the legal limit of 0.08 - two hours later - with nothing more to drink. Then came the odd mismatch of Brian Turner and Dan Young. Both are roughly the same height and weight. Each stands over 6 feet tall at more than 200 pounds. Each guy was drinking straight whiskey on ice. But by the end of the night (seven hours after the party started), Turner consumed 19 ounces of Jameson Irish Whiskey, while Young had downed 20 ounces of straight Kentucky bourbon. Young (at 0.174) registered twice the level of Turner (0.086). One significant difference between the two men, according to the officers at the party, was that Turner had been eating all day. Young, on the other hand, had a bowl of oatmeal that morning and nothing more. Too drunk to drive A body absorbs alcohol much faster on an empty stomach. The difference - as we saw in the case of these two guys - can be profound. It’s also worth knowing; both men felt far too messed up to drive, long before reaching the legal limit of 0.08. Young went so far as to say, earlier in the evening, that his lower blood-alcohol readings gave him a false sense of security that he was “fine” when he knew he was not. Young had come to the party saying that he didn’t really know how long it would take him to reach 0.08, but he thought he’d be able to rely on his experience, 25 years of drinking legally, to know when he came close. We saw a little bit of everything on the night of this party. There were people who believed they were borderline who were in fact well over the limit. And others we were convinced were well over the limit who remained under 0.08 well into the evening. This same thing proved true over several weeks, while watching police officers pull people over on suspicion of drunken driving. They tested people who appeared to have had way too much to drink (based on their field sobriety tests) only to find their number - in one case - below 0.03. It’s important to know that you can be charged with DUI even when your blood-alcohol concentration is well below 0.08. In those ride-alongs with police, we’d seen others who seemed quite fine in the field sobriety tests but proved to be well over the legal limit of 0.08. It stands to reason that experienced drinkers - those with a higher tolerance to alcohol - can, theoretically, perform better with higher amounts of alcohol in their system. This may prove to be the greatest false sense of security, because tolerance will not help you when you’re pulled over by police. In fact, it can be argued, tolerance makes your situation worse. Straight lines, sharp turns You may feel fine, but in Minnesota - as in Florida - the law is not about how you feel. It’s not even so much about how you perform. It’s all about your chemistry. It’s about the amount of alcohol that is found in your breath, blood or urine. As one officer told us, many drunks can drive a car down the road in a straight line reasonably well. The ultimate test is how they respond to the unexpected, whether that’s a sharp curve in the road or a child who runs out in front of him. The consequence of dealing with a DUI charge (which in Minnesota can cost in excess of $10,000) is grave. But it pales in comparison with the possibility of seriously hurting or killing someone. And in Florida, the criminal consequences for these crimes are among the highest in the nation. In 2005, there were 57,571 DUI arrests in Florida, including 6,797 in Hillsborough and 3,613 in Pinellas. Back to that supervised party in my basement. It was a night that “changed my life,” said Valsvic, after her high blood-alcohol level stunned her. “I’ll never forget it.” Rick Kupchella is a television news anchor and reporter in Minneapolis.
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