Chaoticbear, hate to disagree, but that’s in error.
The amount of alcohol which will raise the average person’s blood alcohol concentration (henceforward: BAC) to 0.02 mg% is approximately one shot of hard liquor, one four-ounce glass of wine, or twelve (not sixteen) ounces of beer. This is forensic gospel. Sing it, brother and/or sister.
This gospel is approximate because as I er many people out there well know, the amount of alcohol in hard likker, wine, and BEER of Belgian gloriosity, er, various types can vary a lot. But the average levels are accepted to be: beer around 5% to 7%, wine 12, hard likker 50 to 80%. (Double percentages for proof values.)
It is also approximate because smaller people get as drunk on slightly less beer/wine/hard stuff, and bigger people get as drunk on slightly more. Also, some people are rapid metabolizers who get less drunk on the same amount, and some people aren’t. A cool article in the recent issue of the forensic journal we call “the orange one” (gimme a minute, I’ll think of its name) compared the unfortunate Asians who get redfaced and dysphoric from alcohol with those who enjoy it without said sequelae. Oddly enough, whether you were a fast metabolizer or not was unrelated to whether you turned red in the face or not. Some of the redfaces were fast metabolizers and some of the enjoy-it’s were fast metabolizers. And some not.
Now Listerine would fall between wine and hard likker in its percent alcohol, so one shot of Listerine would equal about one and a half beers, and one and a half shots of Listerine would bring you up to about two and a quarter beers.
Here’s an exercise I give the medical students in the liver lecture (following which, one year, they all got together and presented me with a gift certificate to a local beer brewery). Say you’re an average size person and an average speed metabolizer, which is to say, you can get rid of one twelve-ounce beer / one four-ounce glass of wine / one and a half shots of Listerine / one shot of hard likker, every hour. That is to say, you go up .02 for each drink and you go down .02 each hour. How many beers can you have in an hour and still be legal to drive?