BRITAIN鈥檚 drink-driving law is failing to punish some drivers who are
clearly the worse for wear after heavy drinking.
Neil Wright, a psychiatrist at the University of Leicester, has found that
people who drank heavily the night before and who rated themselves unfit to
drive the following morning would nevertheless have passed a roadside
Breathalyser test. The results add weight to calls for Britain鈥檚 drink-driving
limit to be lowered, he says.
Wright got 58 men to record how much they drank in an evening session.
Friends and relatives confirmed the reports, and Wright measured how much
alcohol remained on the men鈥檚 breath the next morning, seven to eight hours
after they stopped drinking.
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Remarkably, none of the volunteers recorded more than 35 micrograms per 100
millilitres of exhaled air, which is equivalent to the current drink-driving
limit of 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. Some of them had consumed
more than 20 alcohol units, the equivalent of ten pints of lager.
鈥淭hese results are very different from what you鈥檇 expect,鈥� says Wright.
Previous experiments into the body鈥檚 disposal of alcohol suggest that some of
the volunteers should have been over the limit. But these studies have mostly
been conducted in the laboratory, where people were asked to consume a large
dose of alcohol quickly on an empty stomach. The difference may be that Wright鈥檚
volunteers ate either while drinking or shortly beforehand, and drank over a
longer period.
Wright says that he cannot stress too strongly that his study, reported in
The Lancet last week, does not provide an excuse for people to get
drunk at night and drive with impunity the next morning. Most of Wright鈥檚
volunteers felt unable to drive despite being legally entitled to do so.
鈥淭here鈥檚 plenty in the literature to suggest that people with hangovers perform
poorly in tests of coordination,鈥� he says.
Physiological tests to determine whether someone is unfit to drive because of
a hangover are probably impractical, Wright says. However, he says that many of
his hungover volunteers would have failed breath tests if Britain鈥檚 limit was
lower. There are already calls to reduce the drink-driving limit to 50
milligrams/100 millilitres of blood, which would have placed five of Wright鈥檚
volunteers over the limit. In some European countries, the limit is as low as 20
milligrams/100 millilitres of blood. 鈥淓ventually, we would like to move towards
as near to zero as you can get,鈥� says Roger Vincent, a spokesman for the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
Wright hopes that his study will also reinforce the message that drivers who
plead for leniency because they did not realise that they were still intoxicated
from the night before should be given short shrift. 鈥淪uch people have probably
been extremely irresponsible in driving soon after drinking or they鈥檝e been
utterly excessive in the amount they鈥檝e drunk,鈥� he says.