Racial Differences in the
Effects of Alcohol
Information courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
As I have said in previous posts, the single greatest flaw in breathalyzers is that they are designed to assume that all humans are the same. You and I are physiologically different, and I am different at this moment from what I will be in an hour. The ratio of alcohol measured on the breath to the amount in the blood, for example, varies widely from time to time and from person to person. Our bodies metabolize alcohol -- absorb and eliminate it -- at different rates; among other things, this confounds attempts to estimate blood alcohol levels when driving based upon breath/blood tests an hour later. Further, each of us has a different physiological response -- tolerance -- to alcohol.
An example of this human diversity can be seen in racial differences toward alcohol.
The body of scientific literature seems to clearly indicate a racial -- i.e., genetic -- difference in the metabolism and effects of alcohol. Studies, for example, have found that American Indians metabolize alcohol more than twice as fast as Caucasians. Bennion and Li, "Alcohol Metabolism in American Indians and Whites", 294 New England Journal of Medicine 9 (1976); Holzbacher, "Elimination of Ethanol in Humans", 17 Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal 182 (1984); Fenna et al., "Ethanol Metabolism in Various Racial Groups", 105 Canadian Medical Association Journal 472 (1971).
The following excerpt is from one of the books I wrote while teaching at a law school some years ago. Entitled Born to Crime (Greenwood Press: London, 1984), it dealt with the sensitive subject of genetic predisposition toward criminal behavior. One chapter addressed the causes of alcoholism:
...This ethnic approach was first used in 1972 in a study of the comparative effects of alcohol on men and women in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and the United States. Wolff, "Ethnic Differences in Alcohol Sensitivity", 175 Science 449 (1972). Interested by the lower rate of alcoholism among Asians, an American physician selected