"I only had TWO"

Beer's Law

Beer Law #1 Beer before liquor...get drunk quicker.
Beer Law #2 Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
Beer Law #3 One beer, two beer, three beer, four
five beer, six beer, seven beer ... floor.


I have read many police reports, and often people stopped for a DWI are asked, "How many drinks have you had tonight?" Usually the answer is two. For some strange reason it is seen as an appropriate amount of consumption, as in, I only had two, or two is less than three but a little more than one. Two just makes sense.

"Drunk Words are Sober Thoughts"

So it would appear that two drinks would be a reasonable amount of alcohol most people would have with dinner or chatting with friends over a two to three hour time period. The problem lies in that after a stop and arrest for a DWI, and an eventual taking of the breath test, accurately called the chemical test, the breathalyzer, the Datamaster DMT in Ithaca, NY, the machine may read (display) a much higher number. They may have a BAC (blood alcohol concentration) of .12, .15, or even as high as .18, which by the way is an Aggravated DWI. Without more information about the night, their eating, their unique body mass, their weight, their alcohol consumption, as well as other factors I can not tell if the machine is accurate, there was operator error, or there was machine error.

Are all these people lying when they say they only had two drinks or are other factors at work?
Former President Bill Clinton most famously captured the essence of properly answering a hard question. When asked under oath whether he had sex with Monica Lewinsky he replied, "I did not have sex with that woman." He then went on to explain that his definition of sex, and the rest of the world's might be at odds.

Any question must not be answered until we define the words or the terms used in that question. Getting back to our drink question, first we must define what is a "Standard Drink."

So what makes a standard drink? I recently went out with friends and they each ordered martinis. Their huge martini glasses must have had four to five shots (pours) of gin each. Each of their Appletinis had the equivalent alcohol of 4-5 standard drinks. In essence, the two cocktails they drank, was as if they each had consumed 8 -10 beers or 8-10 glasses of wine in a two hour time period. Combined with the fact we only had appetizers, they were each easily in the .08 to .10 BAC range.

So when I look at a client's drink consumption to determine accuracy of the BAC in a DWI case I need to also look at type of drinks, size of drinks, ethanol concentrations of those drinks, and of course the individual's familiarity (yes generally people who are used to drinking process ethanol more efficiently) with alcohol consumption.

Regular drinkers develop more of a hormone called ADH (alcohol dehydrogenases) which breaks down ethanol into acetic acid (vinegar) which is why you literally get pickled with too much alcohol consumption. That is also why some ethic groups genetically (produce less ADH) and therefore do not have the ability to process ethanol as efficiently, and then get drunk more quickly. There are a host of other factors too numerous to go into in this short blog but in some DWI cases I use an special Excel program to compute an individual BAC at time of arrest.

The following are some standard ethanol concentrations:

Beer can range from 3-6% ethanol
Wine can range from 10-14% ethanol
Sherry can range from 18-20% ethanol
Whiskey can range from 40% ethanol

I need to discover or as I say uncover the "real" world consumption patterns. Real world patterns yield far more accurate and actual BAC determinations. So the truth may be that my client only had TWO, but two what?