GERD, Acid Reflux and False Breathalyzer Results
Information courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
Bryan is presently facing criminal charges for driving under the influence of alcohol. Except that he wasn't under the influence of alcohol. He had one drink after work and was stopped at a DUI sobriety checkpoint on the way home. The officer smelled the alcohol on his breath and asked Bryan to step out of the car to take some field sobriety tests. He did fairly well on the tests but, to be sure, the officer asked him to breathe into the breath machine that had been set up at the checkpoint. The results: .09%. Bryan was arrested for DUI, handcuffed and taken to jail; his license was immediately confiscated and he was served with a notice of automatic suspension. When finally released six hours later, he was given a notice to appear in court for arraignment on drunk driving charges.
What happened? How could Bryan have only consumed one beer but registered .09% on the machine -- at least four times higher than would be expected?
Well, to begin with, breath machines (commonly referred to as "Breathalyzers", although there are many competing makes and models) are notoriously inaccurate and unreliable. Calibration, maintenance, repair and use by inexperienced or poorly trained officers are always problems. And there are inherent design defects, such as being "non-specific" for alcohol -- that is, they don't actually measure alcohol; due to the nature of infrared analysis, they will report thousands of other compounds as "alcohol". Another recurring problem is "mouth alcohol".
What is "mouth alcohol" -- and how could this have caused Bran's false reading? The machine measures alcohol on the breath, and an internal computer then multiplies the reading 2100 times to get a reading of alcohol in the blood. This is because the amount of alcohol in the blood is greatly reduced as it crosses from the blood into the alveolar sacs of the lungs and into the breath; the average person has 2100 times more alcohol in his blood than in his breath (this varies widely among individuals, however, and is another inherent defect in the machines).