Alcohol, do you know the facts?

This week we had a client come in for a drug screen and he asked us if the screen picked up alcohol, because he had a “long weekend” and didn’t stop drinking until Sunday.  We explained to him that alcohol doesn’t show on a drug screen, since alcohol was not what was being tested for. Then he stated, “Oh, it wouldn’t matter anyway, since it’s been over 12 hours since my last drink, and alcohol only stays in your body for 1 hour per drink.”  We tried to explain that this wasn’t the case, but he wasn’t listening because he thought what he knew was fact.  This got us to thinking about our blog for the week, and how we can help clear up the myths from the facts.  So let’s look at some of these myths and see what you really know about alcohol.

Myth 1: It only takes 1 hour for your body to break down a drink.

Fact: This myth is partially steeped in truth.  On average, it does take one hour for a body to break down one unit of alcohol.  The key word in that sentence is average, as everyone is different and alcohol affects each person differently.  There are many factors that play into that average: age, sex, weight, type of alcohol, medications, if you ate before drinking, metabolism, and liver function.   

So what is one unit of alcohol?  An alcohol unit is equivalent to 10mL or 8g of pure alcohol.  What that means is for one low-strength beer, lager or cider (like Budweiser or Coors) there is  2 units of alcohol, so it would take almost 2 hours for your body to process that fully.  One large glass of wine or a dark lager can take up to 3 hours to be broken down.  So, if you do one of those “long weekends” of drinking you could still be over the legal drinking limit for driving possibly even on Monday morning. 

Myth 2:  It’s really easy to become sober after heavy drinking.

Fact:  There is absolutely nothing you can do to speed up the process of your body breaking down alcohol from that night of heavy drinking.  All the tips of trying a cold shower, or that pot of coffee, does not do anything to speed it up.  Caffeine is actually the worst thing you can be drinking after a long night as caffeine is a stimulant, and will cause you to have a false sense of confidence that you aren’t impaired, often times leading to riskier behavior and dangerous decisions.

It always seems that someone has that “hangover” cure to help with the process for the next day, but even those don’t help at all.  There is absolutely no research, despite claims to the contrary, that shows eating or taking those “shots” of hangover cures after a night of drinking will help rid your body of the alcohol.  Time is the only thing that will get the alcohol out of your body, allowing your liver to do what it was designed for. 

Myth 3: Mixing alcohol is the worst thing you can do to yourself, because it gets you more drunk.

Fact: Everyone seems to be under the impression that if you start with beer you should only drink beer, and not combine it with whiskey later. But that doesn’t really matter.  It’s not what you drink, but how much you drink that gets you drunk.  Of course, if you have eaten before you start drinking, that will affect how fast your body absorbs the alcohol.  It’s really just common sense with that one.

Now of course, that classic recommendation “beer before liquor, never been sicker” has a little validity to it, but it’s more with psychology than chemistry.  It works, because when you start drinking beer at a certain rate, then switch to a mixed drink, it’s like driving in a school zone, and then suddenly being on the highway.  You can’t taste the alcohol concentration difference, but your body can, so by starting off on the hard liquor you drink a little slower, and feel drunk faster.  If you do switch from beer to liquor, make sure that you slow down along the way, so that your body can adjust.

Myth 4: It’s really easy to trick a Breathalyzer, if you get pulled over.

Fact:  This myth is based on the belief that Breathalyzer “smell” the alcohol in your breath like the police do when they pull you over.  So many believe that sucking on a penny or even eating a breath mint will get rid of the smell, and you can’t get a DUI/DWI, because the instrument won’t catch you.  Breathalyzers actually use a chemical reaction to remove alcohol from the air, and it reacts to another compound in the instrument.  If the Breathalyzer the police are using isn’t working, they will just take you down to the station to perform a blood test. Either way, you lose!

In our office, for us to be able to use a Breathalyzer, we go through training on the instrument before we can use it for the first time.  In order for our instructor to teach us how to see the high and low levels for alcohol content, she swishes with mouthwash.  Yes, mouthwash, because most mouthwashes have alcohol in them. When she blows into the device to show us how the instrument works, we can get a very high reading.  So, this also puts stock in the fact that a breath mint won’t help with “fooling” the instrument, because the instrument is only registering alcohol in the breath. If the positive is caused by the use of mouthwash, the confirmation test done 15 minutes later will verify a negative result, because this low volume of alcohol will dissipate in that time. Thus the reason for a second test to confirm any positive results.

There are so many other myths out there about alcohol, everything from the different ways in which alcohol affects behavior to the myth that alcohol will help you sleep better. Some people believe that not going to the bathroom at all is an answer to the problem of having to go to the bathroom multiple times throughout the night of drinking. We can’t go over them all in just one blog, but we wanted to touch base on the four more common myths, and what the actual facts are for those myths.  The four myths we covered are also the ones we typically hear when we are performing Breathalyzer tests. So, if you do decide you have to have that “long weekend,” or just one party night with binge drinking, be prepared to be “drunk” for the next day as well.