Australian broadcaster and author Clive James once said, “It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.”
The words will resonate with readers of a recent investigation into alcohol breath tests, which help to label, shame and incarcerate thousands of people each year. Yet the devices can sometimes present results that are 40 percent too high, The New York Times found.
The report by Stacy Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg looks at multiple instances where the ubiquitous breathalyzers, a go-to roadside tool of police departments across the nation, have proven to be unreliable. Reasons for the inaccuracies include programmer errors, poor maintenance and various anomalies of human metabolism.
Take the Intoxilyzer 8000, which sounds like the latest model of Terminator from a James Cameron movie and works about as reliably as the robots in those films. Engineers diagnosed improper air flow in the devices as the culprit behind inaccurate results. The solution? Drilling holes into the exhaust valve, a practice that was soon adopted for all machines that Kentucky-based CMI sold to Florida police departments.
As it turns out, the only reliable way to determine if a motorist’s blood-alcohol content is 0.08 grams per 100 milliliters (legally intoxicated) is “to draw blood, which requires a warrant,” Cowley and Silver-Greenberg write. “Breath tests are simpler.”
Of course, test inaccuracies likely don’t just flow in just one direction. If the tests are registering too high in some cases, it stands to reason they are registering too low in others, allowing drivers who are legally drunk to crawl back behind the wheel.
That’s more than just problematic. It can be downright deadly.
Getting a handle on how much alcohol is too much for drivers is difficult. Yes, “drunkenness” is determined by how much a person imbibes, but body weight and the type of beverage they consume are also factors.
How long to wait after drinking before driving is also more complex than the old “one hour per unit of alcohol” yardstick because some drinks contain more units of alcohol than others. Additionally, weight, age, sex, metabolism and general health impact how soon a motorist may be “road worthy” again.
A more important question might be to ask why any level of impairment is considered acceptable for a person operating what is, in effect, a 3,000-pound battering ram. If impairment varies so greatly from person to person based on a series of difficult-to-quantify factors, why not just say “no drinking and driving” across the board, that any level of alcohol is one’s system is too much to drive?
The answer, of course, comes down to money. People like to drink, and businesses like to profit from that habit. Establishments that serve alcohol responsibly, which is most of them, would cry foul.
The alcohol industry, too, which has benefitted from the positive public image generated from “drink responsibly” campaigns, would be less enthusiastic about a restriction that would actually cut into profits.
So Americans are left with another broken system where our trust in the supposed infallibility of technology has been misplaced. File this alongside computerized voting, Facebook ads, and hacking schemes.
If there are any silver linings in the dark cloud of breath testing, it is this: Motorists who are just slightly over the 0.08 breathalyzer threshold would be wise to request a blood test. They might just walk on a drunk-driving charge.
Of course, they should have been walking, not driving, with that much alcohol in their system in the first place.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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