I’ve just watched this video about drink driving. Warning: SFW but quite graphic. It set me wondering: suppose you are the designated driver. You’ve been drinking nothing but soft drinks - so you think - and there are plenty to testify to that effect. But someone has spiked some of your drinks with just enough alcohol to affect your driving and register illegal on whatever tests are used in your jurisdiction. And you have a serious accident. Who’s responsible? Is ‘I was the designated driver; someone must have spiked my drinks’ a reasonable defence?
Prove it.
Joe
Unless you’ve never taken a drink in your life, I fail to see how anyone could reach DUI levels and not be aware of it.
I don’t drink much and the highest I’ve ever been was about .05(est) and I had no doubt I was badly impaired.
I’m not sure you would have to actually prove it but you would have to establish a reasonable doubt.
IMHO it would be unreasonable to expect that a person who is expecting only completely non-alcoholic drinks could drink enough alcohol to be legally drunk without noticing that there was alcohol in the drinks. Anyone who has ever sent a cocktail back to the bartender because it was too weak knows what I’m talking about.
It depends on the law in a given jurisdiction. Many drunk driving laws are considered strict liability- that is, the intent of the person being charged is not considered. In that instance, the “I didn’t know” defense doesn’t work because knowing isn’t part of the crime.
Chances are, if someone is tampering with your drink at a bar, it won’t be with alcohol. Alcohol has an obvious taste and smell, and it would take quite a bit of spiking of quite a few drinks to get someone intoxicated.
From what I understand its the driving while under the influence that gets you in trouble. It doesn’t matter how you got there.
I probably could have until I was at least 29. That was the first time I ever got drunk. Before then I had always restricted myself to a maximum of one scotch per evening, and that was far from an everyday thing, so I would not have had a good feeling for what drunkenness was.
It might still be true. I’ve only gotten drunk thrice since then; the last time was an experiment to see what getting drunk on purpose was like. I’ve been buzzed so infrequently that I’m not certain of my ability to judge what is going on.
Yes, but as I implied in my other post, someone who drinks little, or not at all, isn’t going to be a poor judge of that.
I have no idea what a martini is supposed to taste like, or how quickly it would take me to get drunk by drinking them. If I were presented with a new drink that I were assured was non-alcoholic, but in fact was, I dunno, Mountain Dew spiked with vodka, I mighe be fooled.
First time I had any alcohol-one beer. And I felt dizzy from it.
No doubt I felt something.
Surely you would recognise that you were feeling different? It’s not a subtle effect.
I’ve been breath tested twice when I’ve been right at the limit and both times I felt reasonably drunk. If you’d never been drunk you’d be taking yourself to hospital suspecting you had a major illness.
Putting aside the issue that it would be really hard to get drunk without noticing, is that really true? It seems to me that mens rea, the will to commit the crime is missing.
On the other hand, “My doctor made me take it, I didn’t know it was Epo” is not a viable excuse against doping charges, but that’s not a criminal offence, AFAIK.
Isn’t the drover responsible for assuring they are capable of driving, whether they are tired, medicated, drunk or otherwise impaired? The spiking might help with the sentencing, but by the strict letter of the law the driver would probably be guilty.
But if it’s something entirely new to you, couldn’t one easily misinterpret it – especially since intoxication affects one’s judgment, no?
Actually, what most people think of as the taste of alcohol is a mouthfeel, and the “smell” of alcohol isn’t a true smell, but a numbing of the scent receptors. The former could be masked, and the latter is pervasive in a bar no matter what you personally are drinking. Now, many specific alcoholic drinks do have an obvious taste and smell, but someone who’s spiking drinks probably isn’t going to use one of those. They’ll use something like Everclear, or some other strong vodka that’s pretty much nothing but ethanol and water.
There was a case like this on Judge Judy the other day. Designated driver says he crashed the car because his date drugged his drink. He lost. It was a civil case about the damages to the car. He looked stupid using that as a defense.
You might not know why you are impaired but you should know that you are impaired.
This must depend on what the blood alcohol limit is in the place where you happen to be. With a limit of 0.08g/100ml, I think most people at or approaching the limit would be aware that they were not quite in peak condition, even if they didn’t realise why. But if the limit is 0.05g/100ml or less, at it is in many places, then it is quite possible to be over the limit and not be conscious of being below par at all.
Whether you are committing an offence if you are unaware that you have been drinking alcohol will also depend on the exact terms of the law in the place concerned. But, typically, these laws provide that the offence consists of driving while having a blood/alchohol concentration in excess of the stated limit. How you achieved that blood/alcohol concentration is not relevant. The implication is that it is up to you to ensure that you don’t drink alchohol and, if you haven’t ensured that, don;t drive. (“Did you pour this drink yourself, sir?”)
Call it taste or mouthfeel, but it’s pretty easy to tell if your cocktail is strong or weak, right? And so if you order a Coke and get Coke plus Everclear, you might wonder why it’s burning your insides 
That’s pretty interesting, though…I mean, cops can certainly smell booze on people at a traffic stop, and I can tell if my girlfriend has been drinking even hours later, even if I don’t know she stopped for a drink with a friend. It’s not a smell of wine or a certain liquor, but a generic “alcohol smell” on her breath regardless of the specific beverage imbibed. It sure doesn’t seem like a numbing of my scent receptors – I can pick it up from a mile away.
I still think a tasteless, odorless powder that can be quickly stirred into a drink would be the MO for most “drink spikers” with nefarious intentions. But, that’s not really the point of the post, I guess.
If you could prove that you hadn’t intentionally intoxicated yourself (say, if the bartender and your friends swore under oath that you had ordered and been served non-alcoholic drinks all evening, and they never saw you drink anything else, and there was a creepy guy hanging around…etc.) maybe it would get you off the hook. But I bet to a prosecutor (or a cop) it would just seem like another excuse in a long line of excuses, so you’d have to really prove it.
I once saw a scumbag lawyer on TV who specialized in defending people accused of drunk driving. He said that alcohol is odorless, so how could an officer possibly detect the “smell” of alcohol on someone’s breath? “Research using experienced law enforcement officers has found that odor strength estimates are unrelated to blood alcohol concentration (BAC)…”
However, personally, I’m not buying it.