Drinking and driving, eh? We GOTCHA!

From Cockeyed.com

I have a problem with the law against drunk driving in California.

The law specifies a legal limit of drunkenness, and provides for serious penalties and consequences for exceeding that limit. My concern is that it is very difficult to measure levels of intoxication, requiring complex chemical analysis which is not generally available to people as they assess their own driving ability.

The alcohol limit is a lot like a speed limit. In California, speed limits vary from 10 to 55, 65 or 70 miles per hour. The limits are posted on the roadways where they apply. It is usually easy to monitor your speed, by glancing at your speedometer. Like most people, I rely on the speedometer to keep my driving within legal limits. If I didn't have a speedometer, it would be difficult, if not impossible to determine if I was driving faster than the law allows.

All laws should be written using criteria which are easy to measure, and usually, they are. For example, unlawfully loud car stereos are not judged in decibels, (hard to measure) they are measured by the distance at which they can be heard (easy to measure).

Bicycle headlights are not judged by their lumens (hard to measure), they are judged by the distance they are visible at night, or the distance at which they illuminate the roadway.

The question is, can an ordinary person be expected to conform his conduct to the law? Only if he can measure his conduct.

Monitoring blood alcohol levels is difficult. Holding people accountable for crossing the .08 limit is like holding them accountable for trespassing once they walk past a particular longitude. The line is invisible. It is possible to determine your longitude, but it is awfully tricky if you don't own a sextant or GPS unit.

He goes on about this subject but the short version is ... the guy buys a breathalyzer and conducts his own tests. You can read more about the premise by clicking the link to Cockeyed above (there is a link to the tests on that page) or you can skip straight to the tests here:

The start of the tests:

This AlcoHAWK model featured a red three-digit display, which, if operated properly, would indicate precisely when it was time to call a taxi-cab (.08) and when it was time to start hitting on Joan Rivers (.26).

It was lightweight, easy to use, and it only required one 9-volt battery, which was quickly obtained from our smoke alarm.