Are there some people who can drive better when drunk? Are there studies to support this?
The fact of the matter is that most people are better drivers once they’ve had an alcoholic beverage as compared to those who haven’t had anything to drink.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/01/healthscience/snvital.html
“The researchers, Vince Calhoun and Godfrey Pearlson of Yale, found that the first drink appeared to produce a slight impairment of gross motor activities. But the subjects actually drove a little better, and a little slower, apparently aware of their possible impairment, than they did when they were completely sober, Pearlson said.”
The question in the OP is whether they can drive better when drunk, that is, actually impaired. And that same study indicates that after the second drink they become worse drivers.
I doubt there’s going to be a definite answer to this one, and I strongly doubt that any published study is going to, er, encourage any amount of drinking before driving.
I suspect that you’ll wind up with any number of personal annecdotes. Like, you know, this FOAF said that one or two drinks made him more self-conscious about how much trouble he could really be getting into, and that made him drive more carefully.
(Ah, the trouble with alchohol - knowing when “enough” is too much.) Try this at home - unless your doctor says NO - but please do not try it on the highway.
Nonetheless the cite is interesting. An example of something “They don’t want you to know.” You can almost hear the Powers that Be saying, “We can’t trust people with this one.”
I posted a bit late. That is all.
Colibri-“The question in the OP is whether they can drive better when drunk, that is, actually impaired. And that same study indicates that after the second drink they become worse drivers.”
Yes, I was responding to the thread title ‘Can drinking make someone a better driver?’ and not the thread text ‘Are there some people who can drive better when drunk?’, which is an entirely different question.
But the answer to both questions is available in the link I provided above.
Even drunk is perhaps overstating the case. In a different article on the study, the level of blood alcohol in the subjects was measured three times, at 0.04, 0.08 and 0.1. This barely meets the threshold level for DUI in most states, and is a level at which most people would not consider themselves drunk. In fact, the article states that the authors think that the lowered standard of 0.08 is a more accurate threshold of impaired driving than the earlier standard of 0.1.
Technically, however, this study doesn’t answer the OP. Although thousands of studies have shown that alcohol does impair the ability to drive, even at levels below drunkenness, that doesn’t prove there doesn’t exist somebody somewhere who has the reverse reaction. It’s extremely improbable that such a person exists but we haven’t yet explicitly ruled this out.
Video games tell me I drive better drunk.
I no longer have a cite although there was one once. (Only on paper.)
As a reporter I once participated in an experiment. The experiment was designed to prove to us that we were drunker than we thought, and impaired. The protocol was something like this: six people, 3 women and 3 men, took a road test (driving around cones on a driving course, don’t worry, we were in one of those don’t-try-this-at-home situations), then went into a lounge, had a couple of drinks, played some darts and/or pool, had blood alcohol measured, drove again, went back into the lounge, played some more, drank some more, and then one more breath test and one more road test.
Well. Not surprisingly, everybody’s scores deteriorated somewhat. (We were judged on ability and speed, it was kind of like barrel racing. Points deducted for knocking over cones, points deducted for going outside the lines, measured against speed so that the highest possible score was no errors and the fastest time.) HOWEVER . . .
I had the second best score, both times. The WORST scores of mine and the other guy’s beat the BEST scores of one other participant, and tied the best score of another one.
And yes, by the 3rd test we were all, legally, drunk–and none of us felt like we were.
(Then we sat around for another hour drinking coffee before they would let us drive home.)
Anyway this was reported, somewhere, mostly for the fact that people are very bad judges of when they are “impaired.” But, as noted, some of us were not particularly impaired, and this came out in the report to. When I was “impaired” I took the course slightly slower and that was what knocked my score down–I still managed to maneuver between the obstacles.
The best driver among us had no notable falloff in score between the first test and the last. Although I must say he did NOT get better. Just stayed the same.
I used to hang out with my psychopharmacology professor a lot in college. One night, we went out to a bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He got quite drunk and started explaining to me the studies that show that if you practice a skill often enough while you are impaired, you learn to compensate for these impairments to the point where many people can function at a close to normal level. This effect does not apply in cases where one is completely smashed on a substance. If you cannot stand up or see straight then your are still going to make it on the opening scene of COPS. However, if your BAL alcohol content is 0.1 and you drive at that level every other day, you are generally going to perform much better than a person who drives with that BAL for the first time. You can see this effect in real life if you look closely enough. People from executives to garbage collectors come to work intoxicated all the time and people rarely notice because they have become accustomed to functioning with that level of intoxication. I had a forklift operator admit to me that he came to work drunk, got more drunk at lunch and not one person ever noticed. If raising a 2000 pound pallet 15 feet in the air to fit it into a tight squeeze should not be compatible with alcohol intoxication, then I don’t know what is. Somehow he did it though and probably will continue to do it.
I am certainly not saying any of this is morally right or safe. It is just another factor that you have to take into account.
As a side note, the people I described probably would perform worse in the short-term without the substance due to withdrawal symptoms from their addiction than they would with a moderate amount of the substance in their system.