A lesser known mechanism for alcohol tolerance
trevorklee.com
trevorklee.com
Obviously there are lots of variables based on your size and individual physiology, but on average, each drink raises your BAC somewhere around .02%.
So, even without accounting for an enlarged liver that processed alcohol more quickly, that driver with a 1% BAC in South Africa must have had around 50 drinks in quick succession, then gotten behind the wheel.
Even if you were drinking liquor, that's basically downing two bottles of whisky in under an hour.
Plenty to kill the average person, but apparently not enough to keep this driver from getting behind the wheel.
Wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#Highest_...
I think anyone who has played with a personal breath test device knows that you can get false readings quite easily, but blood tests are something else altogether.
Nobody wants to talk about the (in)accuracy of breathalyzers.
That's because like every other bit of tech used to convict people it's designed to err on the side of convicting people not being accurate.
If you want a laugh look up the sensors they use in the alcohol ankle bracelets. Then look up the OEM specs, calibration requirements, usage environment requirements and accuracy claims by the vendors and try and reconcile the two (several research papers have been written about this). The whole industry is lousy.
I'm skeptical that a case would be thrown out that easily. I have seen expert witnesses getting chewed by the prosecution on minor details. So what if the source is unavailable. It can be argued that the device is tested and regularly calibrated, and that any inaccuracies found will be minor - and certainly not enough to exonerate the defendant.
Yeah maybe there might be some inaccuracy - but then the defendant failed the standardized field sobriety tests. And the cop is saying that they were visibly drunk. Now what?
You pay to have a medical expert come in and explain the myriad conditions that can lead to failing the field sobriety tests. It's simply a question of funding. Even if the case isn't dropped the jury will almost certainly have reasonable doubt.
This is partially why, at least in California, major parts of the penalties for DUI are "administrative" in nature and handled by the DMV.
Even if you do get acquitted in criminal court, it's another set of hearings to get your license back ($$$), lose the special "I got a DUI" SR-22 insurance requirement, etc.
Bizarre
the wrappings were subsequently soaked with 200 ml of 95% (v/v) ethanol. Although the ethanol-soaked cotton was kept covering the skin with rubber sheeting and adhesive tapes for 4–9 hours, no ethanol was measurable in the blood.
In one specific instance, I promptly became incapacitated before even receiving my first drink at the new bar, falling off a bar stool and vomiting on the floor, unable to stand again, let alone walk. The bar-tender was convinced I was overdosing on some hard drug apparently and kicked us all out for being junkies, because I went from walking in perfectly normal and ordering a drink, to this complete disaster on the floor, in the time it took her to prepare our drinks... It must have been a 10-20 minute delay spent between bars on foot that time. The first bar specialized in stiff sweet cocktails, where they mask stupidly high alcohol content with sugary syrup. IIRC it was called Sugar Lounge (in SF). And I have very low tolerance not being much of a drinker, if you've got tolerance I imagine you can push that time-to-incapacitated delay out quite a bit.
This is South Africa we're talking about. He was probably drinking in the car, while driving.
That means they can build up to whatever BAC slowly.
Because that was his lunch.
A bottle of Listerine.
During the holidays they shifted some of us to a morning shift to continue to put items on shelves to match the holiday demand, and I saw him walk in on his day off, grab a fifth of bourbon and a fifth of vodka in the cheap plastic bottles, walk out, and walk back in about an hour later because he had consumed both bottles in his truck in the parking lot. He wanted a couple more to bring back to his apartment.
And as bad as his drinking was, the reason he had sole custody of his daughter is because his ex-girlfriend was a full blown drug addict and he was good at hiding his drinking from CPS.
A "fifth" is also about a fifth of a gallon.
It seems working a liquor store doesn’t count for much on HN.
Now that I'm an adult, I haven't drank anything in a long time you can buy in "handle" size.
That I can attest to. Only two weeks ago a longtime friend of mine died of cirrhosis of the liver and it was doubly horrible as it was very difficult to visit him in hospital due to COVID restrictions (although he wasn't infected as such).
The amount of alcohol he could put away horrified me. I'd often see him at functions and if I poured him a drink and I didn't fill his glass to the brim then he'd get irritated. The amount of alcohol he could consume and still remain coherent staggered me (if I'd consumed the same amount in a single sitting as he was able to then I'd be fully out to it under the table).
Sad really, he was trained as an organic chemist and he knew full well that his liver was being destroyed as it struggled in its first-pass attempt to eliminate the alcohol (that being the partial oxidation of ethanol into poisonous acetaldehyde).
Unless you're using insanely puritanical definitions for "quite drunk" and "can't stand" this doesn't check out. One drink is ~0.02 and there's no shortage of college kids will kill 10+ in an hour with no effect other than becoming drunk and a headache the next day.
Obviously words like typical on the one hand and puritanical on the other hand are sort of subjective. The NIH, probably on the more puritanical side, considers more than 4-5 drinks on one occasion (not per hour!) as binge drinking[1], or more precisely any drinking that raises BAC beyond 0.08%. As for typical, some random internet page[2] claims that on average, male college students have 9 drinks per week (not per hour!).
[1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
[2] https://www.scramsystems.com/blog/2014/02/infographic-much-c...
Around 0.05 I'm tipsy to the point of it being obvious. Feeling good, effusive. And if I'm smart I'll stop drinking around here.
At 0.10 I'm flushed, joyous or melancholic, coordination is affected, I might slosh my drink on the table, and I'm going on and maybe making a bit of a fool of myself. I tend to want to go to bed shortly after. I won't have a bad hangover if I eat a good meal but yes, that's quite drunk in my opinion.
And at like 0.15+, I get very sedated. I tend to pass out and while it's not a stupor I am hard to rouse.
Above that is just passed out black-out drunk and I've only done that a few times thankfully, but I have, so I know that most of a bottle of 750 ml of 80 proof on an empty stomach is enough to potentially hospitalize me, and certainly leave me passed out in a puddle of vomit.
These numbers being for when I am alcohol naive. Not having drunk in months. If I have been drinking regularly you could easily double or triple the numbers. Most people do not have alcohol tolerance though, which is why I assumed an alcohol-naive drinker.
We used to play a game in college where you would drink 1 shot of beer per minute (so 90 oz of beer, or 7.5 cans of beer in an hour), and few people could make it past 30 minutes.
Source: was a binge-drinking college student.
Pretty much everyone I hung out with in college were weekend only drinkers, not exactly the hard drinking crowd.
If people were regularly puking at the end it wouldn't be a popular game, just like if a 6-pack weren't a common amount to consume it wouldn't be a typical unit of sale.
Could definitely depend on your group, but this seemed like a pretty typical frat to me.
My "high score" on a breathalyzer is 0.4%, and that was black out barfey drunk for me.
When in college, NO ONE I knew was able to reach even close to that. If you treat it like a math problem, sure, 1 drink = 0.02.
But in reality, when you can't walk, your body vomits a lot of it out, and friends stop you from drinking, etc. A college aged person without much tolerance can almost never reach that level.
In my AA, no one has gotten close to that. .6 at the most at their worst.
HN gets a massive stick up its ass if you suggest that there exists a large subset of the population who's alchohol consumption is not along the lines one high end beer per week night and two on the weekends.
I'm not saying that everyone is crushing a 12pack on a Friday night but to say that people can't stand at .2 is an equally outlandish generalization in the other direction.
I have no doubt it happens with some regularity, but that's gotta be a least somewhat noteworthy.
I don't know why I'm asking really, seems loads even at 300ml. I suppose just to make the point that without specifying it can be read as almost 100% (resp. 50%) off.
That was also my high score, I was lucid enough to remember the police bringing me to the hospital, blowing in the breathalyzer, and able to walk. It’s crazy what consuming massive quantities of alcohol can do to your tolerance.
That was actually 6 years ago today, haven’t had a drink since. I hope you can achieve something similar for yourself, it is possible :)
there’s a chart on this dmv page that shows you have to be 240lbs to get .02 per drink
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...
I'm not convinced of the values in that table. I think they are being very conservative. My calculations using a BAC formula are different. For example, the .02 per drink seems to work for men weighing 215lbs.
There's a lot of beer these days that's >5% alcohol, so a single beer often has more than one drink.
RIP, you were taken from us too soon.
It's actually "only" 9%. (https://northcoastbrewing.com/beers/year-round-beers/old-ras...)
If you want a high-alcohol beer, consider a draught of Tactical Nuclear Penguin at a bracing 32% ABV (https://blog.brewdog.com/usa/blog/the-worlds-strongest-beer-...)
Higher levels of alcohol can disguise bad or cheap processes. For example, these days red wines are often 14% - 14.5% alcohol or even higher and these percentages are pretty universal irrespective of which region of the world they come from. In decades past the equivalent wines would have been only 12% - 12.5%. (Remember, top first growth Bordeaux reds were traditionally 12.5% - it's the extra ageing that makes them great (at least in part) - not the extra alcohol.)
The spirity character of additional alcohol adds extra zest to a poorly made wine. For instance, a few extra percent alcohol can make up for the much shorter maturity (cask) times that makers allow for wines these days. If anything, we need research to make wines, beers etc. of comparable or even better quality but with even lower alcohol, but there seems precious little interest in that.
In essence, money again trumps health considerations.
No, I'm not a wowser, I've an empty one liter bottle of 56% proof cask-stength single malt Bowmore scotch sitting on a shelf to remind me how nice it was. But that's not the point!
0.11 is very definitely impaired, whether or not you “feel” anything.
False feelings of sobriety are common in heavy drinkers (and users of some drugs with similar mechanisms of action)
Please don’t drink anywhere near this amount and drive, no matter how sober you might feel.
I think it's more of a question about risk tolerance than alcohol tolerance
> In the UK, driving or attempting to drive whilst above the legal limit of 0.08% BAC in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 0.05% BAC in Scotland or unfit through drink carries a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment, a fine of up to £5,000 and a minimum twelve months' disqualification.
Not that anecdotes are data, just to say it 100% depends on the person and the circumstances. Alcohol hits me much harder now.
0.14 was the scientifically determined level of impairment. 0.08 is the number MADD paid for.
In unrelated news, driving deaths per inhabitant or per km are also substantially lower in Europe (2x, 5x, etc, depends on country and metric - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...). Not only due to blood alcohol limits of course, but those changes are symptomatic of an effort to change the rules to actually affect road accident deaths.
The legal limit used to be 0.14, until neoprohibitionists captured our politicians and pushed for the non-scientific 0.08
https://www.businessinsider.com/drinks-before-driving-if-bac... has me at 0.13 after 5 drinks versus 0.21 according to the CA chart. This is an astromical difference that I implies at least one source is lying via statistics.
The article you linked contains charts from the Texas ABC which do not indicate what percentile they measure. The original source [1] is a dead link but it's still available in the Wayback machine [2], where the PDF states "Note: The figures are averages and may vary based on the amount of food in your stomach."
The difference in these charts in no way "implies that at least one source is lying via statistics", just that you are attempting to compare different statistics dealing with something that's going to be quite variable from individual to individual. IMO, the 95th percentile is a better approach, if your intention is to give people a rough intuition for how much might be too much.
[1] http://www.tabc.state.tx.us/publications/brochures/BACCharts...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190903232034/http://www.tabc.s...
After having a "typical" longneck-format beer I'd be at 0.04 and already in the "unsafe to drive" threshold. This is not bragging by the way, don't drink and drive, but we should have a discussion over values that actually make sense.
He had seizures on the way to the hosptial, and was blood tested at 0.7% BAC. He woke up 12 hours later and was still 0.2% BAC (which is really drunk).
Perhaps the third world needs to send an aid mission to the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content (Highest levels)
Alcoholics tend to maintain a high BAC all the time, enough so that even after sleeping they still have enough alcohol in their blood to avoid delirium tremens.
So he probably drank much less than two hard liquor bottles.
Not sure if it's lesser-known, though. When doing beer judging, we're told to load-up on foods with lots of fat and potassium to increase our tolerance (senses start working differently after you're toasted, can make judging tough)
The thing that really gets you is palette exhaustion though. Taste 40 ripe Cali cabs and they all start tasting the same after a point...
[1] Don't worry, I've never tested this theory, I don't even own a car.
However, an enlarged liver helping someone process alcohol better sounds bizarre to me. I thought a liver being able to process alcohol faster was due to increased enzymes since the body again is trying to balance itself and is dealing with what is being introduced by upping certain enzymes, whereas in a non-drinker, those enzymes wouldn't be at elevated levels.
You are correct, in fact an enlarged liver could be a sign that you are less able to metabolize alcohol. "To this effect, the adaptative increase in alcohol metabolism observed in chronic alcoholics disappears in patients with advanced liver disease." [1] Liver enlargement is a sign of liver disease. I guess that's the sort of mistake you will encounter when reading posts regarding biochemistry / medicine on hacker news.
[1] Current concepts in alcohol metabolism https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S166526811...:
Any sources for this? My understanding is that an enlarged liver does not process more alcohol because the enlargement is typically fatty deposits, cirrhosis, and inflammation. I did find an article that says alcoholic livers can produce a different set of enzymes to metabolize the alcohol. But it says it produces a different buzz, bit nothing about faster processing.
Not only did I feel safe to drive, I had to take a breathalyzer once and passed ( although it did have to 'think' a while ).
I did have dinner in the meantime.
The authors misunderstanding of physiology makes me doubt any further conclusions he makes.
Ah, this is the thing I was mentioning earlier, but my other source didn't say that it increased the elimination rate.
Then later he seems to be stating that decreased BK channels would lead to decreased tolerance: "The consequence of this would then be that the development of alcohol tolerance could be slowed or halted by preventing the modification of BK channels, like by using RNAi to degrade certain types of BK mRNA."
Perhaps he meant "by using RNAi to degrade mir-9". Ignoring the above issues, it seems very hand wavy to say "let's just get this RNA interfering drug into your brain and target this specific BK RNA".
"Tolerance represents a critical component of addiction. The large conductance calcium-and voltage-activated potassium channel (BK) is a well-established alcohol target, and an important element in behavioral and molecular alcohol tolerance. We tested whether microRNA, a newly-discovered class of gene expression regulators, plays a role in the development of tolerance. We show that in adult mammalian brain alcohol upregulates microRNA (miR-9) and mediates post-transcriptional reorganization in BK mRNA splice variants by miR-9-dependent destabilization of BK mRNAs containing 3’UTRs with a miR-9 Recognition Element (MRE). Different splice variants encode BK isoforms with different alcohol sensitivities. Computational modeling indicates that this miR-9 dependent mechanism contributes to alcohol tolerance. Moreover, this mechanism can be extended to regulation of additional miR-9 targets relevant to alcohol abuse. Our results describe a novel mechanism of multiplex regulation of stability of alternatively spliced mRNA by miRNA in drug adaptation and neuronal plasticity."
but I very rarely get a hangover (yes this does encourage/ allow school night drinking - inc now)
I have to drink either red wine or over 8 (uk - 568ml) pints of 5%abv lager to start to get fraction of a hangover the next day (starting at a slight thick head level)
incedently for me, eating stuff with sugar and alchol = major acid reflux this took ages to figure out why sometime I was throwing up in the middle of the night (no other symtoms)
another thing that is fairly obivious to me now is how proportional the effect is of the amount of food eaten before drinking and the speed of which you get drunk. This can be used to great effect for big drinking days (eg stag do)
I could easily drink all day comsuming > 15 (uk - 568ml, 5% abv) pints if I keep a level of food in my stomache
I realize after typing this out it sounds a bit preachy, but take it as a caution from someone who felt invincible in their 20s
because I understand how my body works with alcohol, I can now manage my alcohol better (with food/ sugar) I can drink very much more now
forgot to mention - I ALWAYS have one month off drinking (typ January)
and Oktoberfest is the best place in the world - make sure you dress up properly though
So it would just be a matter of training your adrenals to recognize and react quickly to the incoming booze, which for some people is almost like a violent allergic reaction to a bee sting, causing them to drink heavily in order to calm down. I don't really have any research to back this part up though.
Reading again, yup nothing there. Just some generalities.