Let's just call it "legal research"
If you're like me, occasionally you enjoy a drink of something alcoholic. If you're doing this the ideal way, this hopefully involves doing it somewhere in the company of your friends, rather than hiding in your basement and pretending you don't have a drinking problem. And unless you live in a city with outstanding public transportation, at least some of the time this means that you drove your car to get there.
I am very conservative about handing over my keys to someone else if I drove but am not 100% sober. The worst I've never done in that regard have been a few late-night parties where I was almost completely sobered up and where sleep was starting to overtake me, and I judged that the drive home in that condition was better than waiting another hour and then falling asleep behind the wheel. I wouldn't even call it "tipsy driving" ... just that I wasn't 100% sure that I was 100% sober. It certainly wasn't anything illegal.
Or was it? The legal limit in the United States to operate a car is 0.08%. For some reason, last night the thought crossed my mind that I wasn't entirely sure that those few late-night drives had been legal, because I honestly didn't know what 0.08% felt like. And since I'm willing to experiment with things, I decided to find out, just to be sure.
I hit up one of those online calculators that uses the standard formula to compute blood alcohol based on drinks consumed, entered my sex and body weight, and was told that, to hit 0.08%, I'd need to consume about 2.8 US standard drinks, all at once ... since if you consume slowly your body metabolises some of it and your blood alcohol doesn't rise quite as far. Right, so I pulled a bottle of Jäger out of the freezer, did the necessary maths based on Jäger's ABV, and determined that that meant I needed to consume about 3 1/4 shots of the stuff ... which I duly poured and put into a glass.
And I'm looking at that and thinking, "Holy crap, that's a lot ...".
Now had I been sensible, I would have stopped right there, because in practice that much alcohol would represent a pretty heavy NIGHT of drinking for me, and I would have spread it out over several hours to boot. Thus, there was no way that my late-night drives were anywhere close to the limit. But I was still curious what 0.08% felt like, although I recognised that if I did try to chug that much Jäger all at once, straight up, the results would probably not be all that pretty. So I filled the rest of the glass with Coke and sat down to have myself a heck of a drink.
An hour later, as I polished off the tail end of the Coke from Hell, I realised two things: first, that I was in a state that I could describe only as "bleeping drunk"; and second, that I was falling short of 0.08% because an hour had passed. Well, OK, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right ... so I did more maths (yes, I can do maths when bleeping drunk - I crunch numbers for a living, after all), determined the size of the little top-up drink that would be needed, and downed it.
I am appalled that the legal limit is that generous! 0.08% is seriously into non compos mentis territory ... I cannot imagine driving while that drunk. I cannot imagine driving while half that drunk. While I am totally reassured that I have never driven a car while anywhere near that state, I have to question how many lawmakers would support such a generous limit if they performed the same experiment that I just had. And to think, before the campaign a while back to establish a national limit, in most states the limit was 0.10% ...
I have to wonder how many drivers on a Saturday night are out there at 0.075% being "totally legal" until they kill somebody.
I'd like to thank the people I was talking to online during my experiment, who put up with me very well. And after the thoroughly depressing comedown from that level of intoxication, I would definitely say that I have found the level at which alcohol is no longer your friend.
I don't think I'm going to be wanting a drink for a while.