So, Dubbya got popped for drunk driving, scored 1.0 on the breathalyzer. So, how drunk is 1.0? Mildly pixilated? Knee-crawling, commode-hugging drunk? Just enough to get you in the mood to execute somebody?
1.0 is twice what it takes to kill you.
Probably talking about .10. To get that drunk I have to drink 8 drinks within an hour - but I weigh 280 lbs. Someone at .10 usually doesn’t look drunk from a distance (doesn’t make you stumble) but you can definitely tell they have been drinking if you get in a conversation with them, even if you aren’t close enough to smell the alcohol on their breath.
Actually it was .10, 1.0 would be dead. It depends highly on the individual and their tolerance level. For a frequent drinker (which I think Bush was at the time), I don’t think .10 would make you feel drunk; maybe enough to get you feeling frisky. To use your words, “mildly pixilated” would be appropriate. Hell, depending on other factors, you might not even feel much of a buzz at all. For an infrequent drinker, .10 might be quite a bit, however.
.10 is, I believe, enough to render you DUI/DWI in all 50 states – some states have a limit of 0.08, and Congress is trying the old highway funds gambit again to get all states to adopt this lower limit.
BTW, these numbers are percent alcohol by volume, i.e. .10 is 1 mL of alcohol per liter of blood. The human body has about 4-5 liters of blood.
GD: .08 is a bullshit “feel good” agenda. It will do NOTHING to lower drunken driving, as the majority of accidents are caused by people WAY over .10. .08 is just a way to make people think “something is being done!” and will only harm law abiding people who want a few glasses of wine at dinner, or a beer while eating their pizza. No good will come of this becoming law.
–Tim
Bush was pulled for exhibiting classic drunk driving behavior. He was driving overcautiously, below the speed limit. Usually, when someone is driving like that, they’re pretty snockered. There are a lot of factors which may have affected his score, so we can’t really be sure how smashed the guy was.
If he had just had a stiff one for the road, and the officer took him straight to the station and a blood test (which is what they mostly used back then) it’s possible that his BAC rose on the way to the station. He probably would have been pretty okay to drive at the time he was popped–that .08 thing is for the insurance companies and MADD. However, that scenario doesn’t square with the poor driving.
If, on the other hand, the officer delayed in the field, waited for backup, and fully processed him at the station before the test, asked him how Dad and Babs were doing, and generally took his time, the feller probably had a higher BAC on the road than what he scored in the field. I know of several instances where people got “fair shakes” at the station, largely because they were cooperative with the officer and, in one instance, because the DWI suspect was friends with the magistrate.
I myself was treated quite nicely because I was completely cooperative with the officer, passed the field sobriety test, and because he had to manufacture an excuse in order to pull me over in the first place. “Nicely,” in this case means that there were numerous delays in my processing, presumably to give me a chance to sober up some before the test.
In my case, a particularly egregious violation, my BAC still scored a .15 at the station well over an hour after I blew a .15 into the field breathalyzer. That probably means that my BAC went sky-high for awhile as that pitcher of green beer made its way through my system.
If I can pass a field test with a .15+, I suspect Bush, also a party animal, probably could have walked a tightrope with a .10. Unless, of course, other substances were involved, or he was given a lot of time to sober up, or an obliging officer recorded his score as a .10 regardless of how high it actually was. One thing is certain: we’re never going to learn the whole truth.