Drunk Or Not?

Washing down a burrito with a daiquiri or two will soon put you over the legal limit in Maine, if one lawmaker gets his wish.

A state senator proposes to lower the legal blood alcohol level in motor vehicle operators in Maine to 0.06 percent from the current legal limit of 0.08 percent. "What I am proposing is that a person with average weight who has had three drinks in rapid succession over an hour with no food in his stomach should not drive," said Sen. Peter Mills, R-Cornville. "That’s what the studies show a person would have consumed to reach the limit I am proposing. I think a person at 0.06 is well on their way to significant impairment, in my opinion," he said.

Interesting argument. Someone driving in the general direction of the ocean is "well on his way" to hitting the water, I suppose. But that's not the same as, you know, hitting the water.

Mills, a lawyer, said the reality of Maine’s OUI laws is a bit different from the apparent preciseness of a blood alcohol level determined to two decimal places. He said the devices used to measure BAC, blood alcohol content, have a margin of error.

Mills isn't lying. They do. In fact, breathalyzers have a universally recognized margin of error of twenty percent, and that's literally just the half of it. In many states, police must produce two breathalyzer results from a suspected drunk driver (that is, they're required to let the driver blow into the device twice in succession). To be admissible in court, the two test results must be within .02% of one another, so if the first reading is .10% and the second one .12% or .08%, no problem. That's a huge tolerance — one that translates into a possible forty percent margin of error.

Would you buy a computer whose hard drive has a double-digit margin of error? Would you choose an orthopedic surgeon who boasts that only 40 percent percent of his patients die on the operating table?

But for the government and its wheel of justice, that's good enough, apparently.

It's appalling that tens of thousands of people a year are essentially convicted by a little machine that we know to be that unreliable. But not to Peter Mills. Mills reaches the opposite conclusion, saying that a margin of error of twenty to forty percent is not just perfectly acceptable; it's the very reason to lower the alcohol limit so that more people can be snared by the wildly inaccurate technology.

To be clear, I loathe drunk drivers. Under the current standards, if I have four or five beers in two hours, I'm under the limit, even though I know that I'm more or less impaired at that point (your level of tipsiness may vary). So yeah, it may well be advisable to lower the limit — as long as we don't rely on drunken pretzel logic like that of Peters Mills, and as long as we don't also lower our standards of what constitutes "reasonable doubt" by putting our trust in technology that is not now and has not ever been ready for prime time.

Comments

[K. Dale Boley]

There ought not be a limit or threshold of drunkenness. What we should expect is that people are held to account for their actions. If someone crashes into me, what difference does it make how much (or if any) they had to drink? Frank Zappa said "Consuming a substance does not give you the right to act like an asshole". It also does not give one the right to drive like an asshole.

[Myrtle]

It's backed by Mothers Against Everything?