18 Times the Legal Blood Alcohol Limit?

[BPSCG]

My BS detector pinged into the red zone on this one (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060524/ap_on_fe_st/lithuania_record_drink_driver_5).

Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 727 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliters of blood repeatedly on different devices when he was pulled over for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius on Saturday.
Lithuania's legal limit is 40 milligrams of alcohol in 100 milliliters of blood.
"This guy should have been lying dead, but he was still driving. It must be an unofficial national record," Saulius Skvernelis, the director of the national police traffic control service, told the AP. "He was of high spirits and grinning the whole time he was questioned."
Medical experts say anything above 3.5 grams per liter of alcohol in the blood is lethal for most people.

[Rob Lister]

1.44% and driving (breathing)?

Something is wrong with their tester.

[geni]

They are pretty reliable and the multiple tests suggests not. There are a few cases on record where people withstand very high ethanol levels.

[Rob Lister]

What does occum's suggest?

[Charlie Monoxide]

1.44% and driving (breathing)?

Something is wrong with their tester.Hmmm, I gotta agree. That's a no. 2 load of alcohol in one's system. Perhaps with years of practise someone can become immune to the effects of alcohol.

Charlie (I've being trying for years) Monoxide

[BPSCG]

What does occum's suggest?Well, if something was wrong with their equipment, it would become apparent in testing other drunk drivers.

Ditto if the testers were incompetent.

Perhaps the story itself is a hoax?

Alternatively, Geni, can you point us to something that supports what you wrote about some people being able to tolerate very high-ethanol levels?

[geni]

Alternatively, Geni, can you point us to something that supports what you wrote about some people being able to tolerate very high-ethanol levels?

It got mentioned in some of the older guinnness book of records. Other than that:

http://www.atsnn.com/story/109318.html

You would probably run into more stories if you dug back further. People with very high blood ethanoil levels do turn up from time to time.

[Dancing David]

My BS detector pinged into the red zone on this one (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060524/ap_on_fe_st/lithuania_record_drink_driver_5).


It may sound preposterous and likely is, however I have seen the blood work of people who come into the ED all the time. The highest i have encountered was a .457. Which is a very high alcohol level when you consider that .08 is the legal limit to drive in Illinois. What is even more amazing was that the person was alert and oriented and capable of speech, if having some imparment. The highest I have heard of was a .572.

These are all levels that are toxic for people who are not tolerant of alocohol through repeated overdosing. It is very coomon for people to come to the ER with .3 or higher.

I too question the 1.4 value, but I find it not implausible , having met alcoholics who drank a gallon of vodka, or more , a day. I have met an individual who states that when he decided to quit drinking he had gone on a binge and passed out for two days, when he went to detox he still had an alcohol level of .24 by his report.

So while the 1.4 seems preposterous, it might actualy havre happened, how long that individual is going to function at that level before they die is another matter.

[Dancing David]

I tried to google the answer, but couldn't find a defintive result, I tried alcohol in combination with toxicity, poisoning , and limits.

The closest i could come is the the LD 50 for alcohol is a BAL of .4. So this means that .4 is a lethal dose of alcohol for fifty percent of the population.

So it seems plausible that someone could have a BAL of 1.4 if they were in the top 1 percentile. And given that alcoholism will raise toelerance to alcohol poisoning is doesn't seem implausible.

Stupid but maybe possible.

[Beady]

I used to teach the class you have to take in most states to regain your license after a DUI. It is possible to build a tolerance for alcohol but, while your tolerance is building, the rest of you is dying. This story is plausible, but I have my doubts this guy is going to live through the next winter.

[Bikewer]

The county PD I used to work for did their own Breathalyser tests at the booking desk years ago, and one fellow "blew" a .62 or so. By all accounts, he should have been comatose, but he didn't even seem all that impaired. The officer who brought him in said he expected a .20-ish reading.

Long-time alchoholic, it turned out.

[davefoc]

Bulgarian doctors tested a man's blood-alcohol level five times before accepting it was 0.914 – nearly twice the amount considered to be life-threatening.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/01/04/drunk-bulgarian-050104.html

[davefoc]

1.44% and driving (breathing)?

Something is wrong with their tester.

It seems like his BAC was 18 times the legal limit in Lithuania where the legal limit is .04%. He was only about 9 times lhe US/Canada/UK limit of .08%.

Using the units common in the US and some other places I believe his BAC was .727%. Still above the level believed to cause death in most cases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content

[Boo]

.727? I believe that. Most of the ones I've seen at that level were intubated in the ICU but there are the rare few long time big time drinkers that will sustain that. One frequent flyer to the ER would go into DT's if his BAC went below .2 . He averaged .5 on any given visit. He was 5 years younger than I am and looked 20 years older.



Boo

[davefoc]

I thought there might be some interest in my own story of large alcohol consumption. I was about 20 and had consumed very little alcohol previously. I doubt that I had ever even made it to drunk up to that point.

A buddy of mine had decided to drop out of college and go into the military and we shared a quart of 80 proof vodka. I drank somewhat more than half the bottle in the form of screwdrivers (vodka and orange juice) over a period of about two hours.

My guess is that I had the equivalent of about 14 drinks. Assuming that my body removed the equivalent of somewhat less than two drinks in two hours my BAC was probably about .25.

At about the two-hour mark I was wildly drunk. The world seemed to spinning at a rate that made it impossible to stand up. I tried to puke in the toilet but I couldn't hit it. So I tried to puke in the bath tub but I couldn't hit that either so I ended up puking all over the bathroom. The next day I went to work and was hit with severe nausea and puked all over the floor at work. For a year or so after this event the smell of orange juice would make me nauseous.

[Dancing David]

BTW the figures I reference are blood alcohol levels because the ER uses them, psych hospitals won't let us use breath results to determine sobriety.

[Beady]

My guess is that I had the equivalent of about 14 drinks. Assuming that my body removed the equivalent of somewhat less than two drinks in two hours my BAC was probably about .25.

I would need your body weight to be exact but, at 260 lbs, each drink would have added .01 to your system while, over two hours, you would have eliminated .03 (.015/hr). 14 drinks in 2 hours would therefore have given you a BAC of ~0.11. The rate of elimination is the same per hour, regardless of weight, but the BAC per drink increases at lower weights.

[davefoc]

Beady, I don't know where you are getting those figures but they are inconsistent with what I have read and they are inconsistent with the data that was presented to us when I sat on a jury for a drunk driving case.

The numbers presented to us for a 170 pound man (which is about what I weighed back then) were .02 for each drink consumed and .015 lost each hour.

These numbers seem to be roughly consistent with the data in the Wikipedia article I previously linked to.

ETA: Sorry Beady my 55 year old eyes misread the 260 pound weight you listed for your subject..

[Meadmaker]

I remember a story about a "fire-eater" being pulled over by cops, and registering off the scale. Apparently, the presence of butane in his mouth pinged the alcohol meter, and made it give a false reading.

I would have to suspect that this Lithuanian was drunk, but had eaten something, or had something in his mouth, that gave off some other hydrocarbon that caused a false reading on the meter.

[Beady]

ETA: Sorry Beady my 55 year old eyes misread the 260 pound weight you listed for your subject..

No problem. The only reason my 56-year-old memory recalled the figure for 260 lbs was that that was my weight back when I taught the course. .02 at 170 lbs sounds about right, and we agree on the .015 elimination per hour.

[Beady]

I would have to suspect that this Lithuanian was drunk, but had eaten something, or had something in his mouth, that gave off some other hydrocarbon that caused a false reading on the meter.

Possible. The story, however, says "...registered 727 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliters of blood repeatedly on different devices" (emphasis mine). Did they only try him on different breathalyzers, or did they also give him a blood test? A result like that would be too incredible to stand up in court, I would think, unless you had it documented every possible way (precisely for the reason you mention).

[luchog]

Hmmm, I gotta agree. That's a no. 2 load of alcohol in one's system. Perhaps with years of practise someone can become immune to the effects of alcohol.
Some people simply don't react to acohol, even have a natural immunity to it.

I've heard a lot of stories from ER personnel and EMTs about people who have insanely high levels of alcohol in their bloodstream, and are able to cope with it better than an average person after a 6-pack. Natural variation in human physiology hits some pretty serious extremes.

As an anecdote; I have a friend, about 6'4" 225lbs, who I have never seen get drunk. I have seen him drink enough to kill me (I was 6' 140lbs at the time); and still be dead cold sober. On a number of different occasion. And he's not a habitual heavy drinker. He's a mutant.