Drinking and Driving

It looks blurry because you’ve drunk too much.

Most of us have never had a DUI offense. We simply don’t drink enough to have an illegal Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) high enough for a citation. In California, the limit for alcohol in your blood stream is 0.08%.

But suppose your celebrating your darling daughter’s wedding. You’d like to toast her future life. You’d like to unwind with champagne at such a wonderful event, but you don’t want to drive drunk. It’s not safe. It’s against the law.  A DUI offense could cost you thousands. You could lose your license. This would cripple your traveling flea-circus tour.

As it stands, the safe and legal BAC depends of the number of drinks you’ve had, your weight, and your sex as can be seen in table on the right.

Sobering numbers, and rightly so, but the celebrating driver has been given two signficant loopholes, changing your weight and your sex if you’re a woman. Let’s examine these loopholes.

1) Massive weight gain.

BAC is calculated by dividing the alcohol in your blood stream by your weight. Doubling your weight halves your BAC. I’m allowed to drink more alcohol, because of my weight, than are most men. So there is a huge incentive for the drinking man to tub up as the following table shows.

Drinks       Legal for man if he      Legal for woman if she
­          ­   ­     weighs more than        weighs more than
—————————————————————–
1                             75                                 67
2                           150                               133
3                           225                               200

4                           300                               267
5                           375                               333
6                           450                               400

7                           525                               467
8                           600                               533
9                           675                               600
10                         750                               667

2) Sex Change – Works only for some women

As the DMV’s table (at the top) shows, a woman who weighs 160 will be legally intoxicated if she has two drinks. However, if she opts for a sex-change operation to become a man, those same two drinks will leave her legal to drive.

Similarly, a woman who weighs 240 pounds will also benefit from a gender change.

Note well, these two options might not be the right choices for you. Side effects, consequences, etc.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.