July 4.
The police are right to be concerned about the pocket breathalyser
(July 1). Not only may some people drink up to the limit but in a series
of experiments funded by the Alcohol Education and Research Council and
conducted along with our colleague, Professor Keith Millar, we have
found that people's inability to drive after alcohol is not well related
to their current blood alcohol reading.
Impairment on tests of ability to react quickly and steer accurately
can occur below the legal limit for driving and can still be present
after someone's reading has dropped below the legal limit. ''Legal''
does not mean ''safe''.
People also vary considerably in how alcohol affects them.
Conventional wisdom is that people who drink more frequently can handle
alcohol better. We have found that this is not entirely the case.
Frequent drinkers learn to compensate for the effects of alcohol by
trying harder, but their increased effort is often at the expense of
other important aspects of the task.
For example, someone may concentrate carefully on steering the car
along the road and arrive home without incident. Unfortunately, bceacuse
they are concentrating harder than normal on steering they will be much
slower to react if something unexpected happens such as a child running
into the road. The many drivers who continue to claim that they drive
all right after a couple of drinks because they are ''careful'' should
be thankful that they have yet to encounter such an emergency.
We might also point out that the defence of unwittingly ingesting
alcohol sufficient to bring one over the legal limit (in fruitcake,
trifle, spiked drinks etc.) is often a fib. In our experiments most
people given enough alcohol to reach the legal limit can tell that they
have had alcohol because they recognise the effects which it has on the
body.
For safety people should not drink at all before driving or operating
other dangerous or demanding machinery. To discourage the game of
guessing how much alcohol is ''safe'' we would favour a reduction of the
current legal limit to 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100ml of blood,
which would provide some leeway for people who have fermented alcohol in
their gut or have genuinely taken a small amount of alcohol in food. To
killjoy is surely better than to kill.
Richard Hammersley
and Frances Finnigan,
Behavioural Sciences Group,
University of Glasgow.
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