So here’s a little morally charged account for you…

Many South Africans drive home each night with a blood alcohol level over the legal limit. Blame a lack of public transport, expensive taxis or whatever else you want, but it is still both illegal and dangerous to do it and you are playing Russian Roulette every time you get behind the wheel. Ok, enough of the serious stuff, let’s get down to the point of this post.

The Question
How many drinks can you have before you can no longer drive home safely? It depends on many things, right? Your body size, your choice of drink, the time it took you to consume the drinks. What about whether or not you ate first? And if you are fit? The permutations are seemingly endless. Despite all of this, we tried to dig a little deeper to see if we could get some answers to the question: “When have you had too much to drink?”
The Plan
We roped in some locals to come and get drunk with us. Yes, it was a very tough sell. In the end, we had a mixed bag, including females/ little people/ big people and even the boys from Mycitybynight.co.za – chaps who blog about this sort of thing as a profession…
When it came to measuring our alcohol levels, we were very ably assisted by the guys at Breether SA, a Cape Town based company that has recently made civilian friendly breathalysers available – gadgets that give an incredibly accurate reading (They’re tested and supported by Safely Home). These things are accurate enough to know whether you should even consider stepping into the car in the first place and they’re the size of iPods – maybe a Christmas gift this year?(Buy them here)

The idea was to get a few different people drinking a variety of drinks and measuring the blood alcohol level at various stages.
After making sure we all began with zero alcohol in our systems (we never know what some people have for lunch), we got stuck in. Chelsea, our female tester, had wine, Craig (the ginger guy) mixed wine, beer and shooters. I stuck to beers, but consumed them at a somewhat above average rate while Ricky (classed as a “small male”) had gin and tonics – he’d heard a theory that G&Ts wouldn’t even register on breathalyser devices (Um, no. Uber-fail)…
The Numbers Game
According to the Breether Guys, the number we had to care about was .240 – a measure of the amount of alcohol in our systems. Let’s not get into too much detail over what and how we measured (unless we get lots of requests?), but know this: if we were under 0.240 on the Breether device we’d be safe to drive. If our reading was over that, we had problems…
The Answer
Of all the things we learnt over the evening, the most revealing had to do with time and how it can affect the readings on a breathalyser. Having only sipped a single drink, Craig was far over the reader’s limit when he tested a few seconds later – because Breathyzers are measuring alcohol on your breath, swigging back just one shot as you exit the club could see you in a tricky situation if you are stopped minutes later at a roadblock nearby. Residual alcohol on the breath won’t get you locked up for drunk driving, but if you get tested fairly soon after your last swig, you’ll have some explaining to do when the breathalyser shows an inflated number – not really worth the stress… After waiting for about 30 minutes the results took a dive and our results dropped well within the accepted range.

The beers were as bad as the shots, so getting tanked on beer is NOT going to be a safer drive home that smashing shots all night (You’d think that was obvious, but we had patrons arguing the opposite), and the speed at which you’ll go over the limit was exponentially shortened by downing the beers – fast assimilation into the blood is a kicker.

Food did indeed assist us in bringing our readings down, so the effects of the Chardonnays were vastly reduced as more food went in. I suppose a massive Shwarma at the corner Deli can do a lot to improve your ability to drive home, particularly when you think about the extra time you’ll take to get behind the wheel if you sit down and eat first.

Later on, we moved on to the Smartaboutwhat office party, where employees had been laying into the drinks from early in the evening. The most remarkable aspect of the evening was that not one person was under the limit, not a single one, even though many thought they were. If there is one thing that we learned from the entire exercise it’s that even when people know they are going to be tested and aim to keep within the legal limit, the vast majority go beyond the threshold before they have realised it.

All the guinea pigs were shocked to see that their levels were far above what they had expected. We even had one chap who’d had claimed to have potted 17 drinks and who recorded a figure of 1.7. While he was very proud of his achievement, he ended up in the hospital with a “severe stomach issue” later that night…

My Conclusions?
The results were always higher that we thought they’d be – especially when people felt they’d be ok. The really drunk people knew that had overstepped the mark, but those who felt they’d be just ok, never were. Not once. If you feel good to go, you need to remember just how sensitive these machines are.

If you’ve had some drinks with dinner or after work, the best thing to is wait for at least half an hour before taking to the road. Apart from making you more competent to drive, if you’ve had a drink less than 20 minutes before taking a test, an incorrect reading will say that you are “drunker” than you actually are – the residual alcohol could be your downfall.

Lastly, repeatedly making poor jokes about ‘blowing’ on the breathalyser is a lot funnier after a few drinks than when you soberly review the footage two days later. I apologise for the plethora of puns…