https://www.zdnet.com/article/draeger-breathalyzer-breath-te...
My understanding is that GA pilots are not allowed to fly within 8 hours of consuming any alcohol (my understanding is that most commercial outfits have more stringent limits) - I personally think this makes a lot of sense for operating a motor vehicle, too.
As a starting point I think you will agree that someone who has a BAC of zero ought to be able to drive.
The majority of drunk driving accidents are the result of people that are plowed. More disturbing by far those who ARE caught and jailed have driven hundreds of thousands of miles drunk as a skunk before actually getting taken off the road.
As BAC decreases accident rates decline towards normalcy at around 0.06 its difficult to distinguish the accident rate of those who have consumed and those who have not.
People at that point neither walk nor drive funny and are very unlikely to be discovered unless you stop and test everyone or you happen to be black or Hispanic.
Instead of tightening already reasonable standards to ridiculous levels we would save vastly more lives by actually enforcing the laws we have effectively.
Not if they are tired or hungover. I mean, I don't think people should drive when they are tired for other reasons, either. It's a dangerous thing, and something you should only do when you are at your best.
Alcohol is just an easy target (and an important target) because it both degrades your actual ability, while at the same time, increasing your opinion of your ability. Because of that second effect, it's especially difficult to tell when you have had too much to drive... because one of the common side effects of alcohol is an increase in confidence.
It should be difficult to drive, and it should be easy to lose the ability to drive.
>Instead of tightening already reasonable standards to ridiculous levels we would save vastly more lives by actually enforcing the laws we have effectively.
eh, we already have rules against driving tired. they just lack an objective test.
I think that if you think you can operate a motor vehicle or a gun in public at 0.06, you are not being nearly careful enough. (And I suspect the additional confidence that alcohol gives you might actually contribute much to accident rates. I know I certainly feel more confident one drink in, and confidence is deadly when you are operating weapons or heavy machinery around other people.)
It's a confirmation, and when you're about to sentence someone on the spot with what is often a life changing, multi year disqualification from driving, the courts require the police to be absolutely sure.
But even that is too simplist. You need to activity give a specific dose to a group with similiar profiles. You need to test with different profile groups.
Remember we are testing currently high not has been high.
It's going to be fairly easy to test this. You take one group of people who haven't smoked in the last few hours and you test them. Make sure it doesn't go off. You take another group who have smoked (I'm sure plenty of college students would be happy to sign up for this trial) and you test them, make sure it does go off. It's pretty simple. It's a machine with an empirical number, so you don't even have to do this double blind.
And if it doesn't give good results? It won't hold up in court. Every lawyer defending someone with a positive result (whether false positive or true positive) will argue that the device isn't accurate and the case gets tossed (or even the ability to use these as evidence). If it doesn't hold up in court, police really won't have much incentive to use these anyway.