Photos by Brittne Lunniss
ABSTRACT:
After two drinks, do you think you could accurately guess your blood alcohol content? Do you think just under 0.08% is safe to drive?
In Washington, State Senator John Lovick, a former Washington State Patrol Trooper and Snohomish County Sheriff, has been arguing for years that it’s not. Session after session, he’s introduced bills to lower the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.08% to 0.05%, and session after session, the bill has languished in committee.
We here at The Stranger realized that we didn’t have an informed opinion on his bills, because we didn’t know how different 0.05 and 0.08 would feel, or how many drinks it would take for us to get there.
So we devised a semi-scientific experiment using 10 subjects, too much alcohol, and Mario Kart 64. And we learned that yes, the legal blood alcohol limit is too damn high.
BACKGROUND:
Drunk driving is a very, very bad idea.
You can kill yourself. Take a life. Break a family. Destroy cars. Fuck your insurance premiums. Get that license suspended. Boil in legal hell and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to do it. Embarrass Mom. Disappoint Dad. Remind everyone of Uncle Jim, the bastard.
We could smash an egg (or a head) with a frying pan, PSA-style, to make a beleaguered point about drinking, but that won’t stop people from climbing into their vehicles piss-drunk and ending their lives in a plume of fire. Washington traffic deaths hit a 30-year high in 2023. More than 800 people died that year. Half of those fatalities were linked to impaired driving.
Everyone seems to have their own idea of what driving drunk feels like. There’s the type who won’t get behind the wheel if alcohol has touched their lips in the past 12 hours, those who are fine cruising after one or two beers, and, of course, the shaky, shortsighted daredevils with abundant confidence and pungent breath. Legally speaking, though, in 2003, every state in the country agreed on a number: If the concentration of alcohol in your blood is 0.08% or higher, you’re too drunk to drive.
Many people, including a handful of Washington legislators, think that number is too high. Research suggests impairment begins at 0.05% BAC or lower. Data included in a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report found that impairment begins way below .08 in driver simulations. At 0.001% to .009%, subjects displayed divided attention and strayed into the center lane. At 0.01% to 0.019%, people grew drowsy. At 0.02% to 0.029%, reaction time lagged. At 0.03% to 0.039%, subjects were less vigilant and perceptive. To put it as simply as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: impairment begins with the first drink.
The drunker we get, the dumber we get, and the more a car is like a Goldbergian contraption that hungers for speed and gasoline-soaked, lightly-braised human meat. Again, impaired driving kills hundreds of people in this state every year.
Sen. Lovick’s bill isn’t visionary. The US is an outlier on BAC. Three quarters of the world set their limits at or below 0.05%. Like Lovick, the NTSB has been fighting to lower it for years. So have lawmakers in states, including Connecticut, New York, Colorado, and Hawaii.
So far, Utah is the only state that has lowered their legal limit to .05. That makes sense in a state that’s about a third Mormon, a religion that forbids drinking. But it appears that Utah’s experiment in being superior to us is working. In 2019, the first year it lowered the legal limit, Utah saw a nearly 20% reduction in fatal crashes. It’s been six years. Copycat bills should have swept the nation and passed handily, right?
No. Both Colorado and New York have added a second tier to their legal code—Driving While Ability Impaired—with 0.05% limits, but violations at that level come with lower penalties. Overwhelmingly, this is the land of “give us liberty, or give us death.” And for whatever reason, Americans tend to choose both.
METHODOLOGY:
Our unscientific science experiment started with three basic materials: booze, breathalyzers, and an N64.
We wanted to assess both our ability to guess our BAC and our dexterity at 0.05% and 0.08%. So each subject chose one booze that they would drink for the whole night (beer, wine, Malört, tequila, gin, vodka, whiskey, or White Claw). Then we ate two slices of pizza each and sat down at the N64.
Each subject played a baseline round of Mario Kart 64 while they were sober, and we tracked their time and the number of crashes.
Then we started drinking. Twenty minutes after each drink, we guessed our BAC, and then blew into the breathalyzer for an accurate reading. If we’d crossed 0.05%, it was time to do another round of Mario Kart. And then again for 0.08%.
Subject A
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 155 lbs.
Gender: Female
Drink: 12 oz. White Claw (mango)
Notes: Subject A had to be taught how to hold an N64 controller before her first race. Her sensitivity to alcohol and, particularly, whatever bullshit is in White Claw made the next day’s 5 a.m. light rail shift very difficult.
Subject B
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 180 lbs.
Gender: Female
Drink: 2 oz. Malört
Notes: 8 oz. of Malört is too much Malört. The allotted 20-minute wait to take a breathalyzer test was not long enough for Subject B to process all that Chicago Spirit, and an hour after this test was over, she was properly Windy City Wasted. Again, 8 oz. of Malört is too much Malört. A treatment of 20 panicked minutes in the bathroom, a couch, and Ezell’s chicken prevented acute hangover symptoms the next morning, surprising all, subject included.
Subject C
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 236 lbs.
Gender: Male
Drink: 5 oz. white wine
Notes: Subject C does not have a license and has never driven. He had also never played Mario Kart before the moment we put the controller in his hand. But he may have a supernatural ability to metabolize alcohol, as his BAC went down between tests 2 and 3.
Subject D
Height: 5’5”
Weight: None of my business
Gender: Female
Drink: 2 oz. tequila
Notes: Subject D drank tequila out of a Betty Boop shot glass. She agreed to the experiment thinking she’d be consuming a maximum of two drinks. After eight one-ounce shots, the subject was unable to navigate public transit and had to wait for an Uber at her coworker’s apartment.
Subject E
Height: 5’3”
Weight: 150 lbs.
Gender: Unclear
Drink: 12 oz. India Pale Ale (7% ABV)
Notes: With every drink, Subject E yelled about the double-decker school buses in Mario Kart a little bit louder.
Subject F
Height: 5’ 6”
Weight: None of your business
Gender: Female
Drink: 3 oz. soju (grape)
Notes: Subject F finished two full bottles of soju without hitting 0.08% BAC. However, she reported feeling far too drunk to drive, and refused to get any more drunk. Icon behavior.
Subject G
Height: 6’3’’
Weight: 210 lbs.
Gender: Male
Drink: 2 oz. whiskey
Notes: During his final race, Subject G turned to our timekeeper and said: “They won’t let me live, Megan.”
Subject H
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 285 lbs.
Gender: Male
Drink: 2 oz. vodka
Notes: Subject H’s tests reminded us that we’re not scientists. We failed to account for the diversity of time it might take for people to metabolize alcohol, and as a result, it took 14 oz. of liquor for Subject H to finally blow above 0.08%, but after the experience, he told our timekeeper: “I can’t feel this pizza in my mouth.” And when he left the lab, everything hit him at once. Casualties included: one toilet seat lid, Subject H’s ability to experience sunlight the next day.
Subject I
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 119 lbs.
Gender: Female
Drink: 5 oz. prosecco
Notes: Subject I got increasingly mad at the Mario Kart game, which she had never played before and “didn’t care for” (which she repeated many, many times), and tried to put the controller down mid-race so she could yap with colleagues instead. She did, however, feel confident she could “easily drive everyone to Canada in a Sprinter” after drinking the entire bottle of prosecco. She also had band practice directly after this experiment and felt as though she sang and played the keyboard pretty damn well; her bandmates have neither confirmed nor denied this as of this writing.
Subject J
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 160 lbs.
Gender: Female
Drink: 2 oz. gin
Notes: During her Mario Kart tests, the number of times Subject J said “Fuck” went up with her BAC.
Conclusion
We learned a few things from this test.
We learned that Subject I “would have been better at the game if she actually cared about it.” We learned that some of us process alcohol at extremely different speeds.
We learned that Malört is evil in large quantities.
We learned that Subject C should be studied for his ability to make alcohol disappear from his blood.
But most importantly, we learned what the legal limit felt like. Every subject agreed that 0.08% BAC was higher than we would have hoped, and no one felt they should be behind a wheel in the twilight between 0.05% and 0.08%.
“I’m radicalized,” said Subject B, repeatedly, in a haze of Malört and Ezell’s fried chicken. Based on how she felt, she wouldn’t have gotten in a car at 0.026%.
Our unscientific experiment backed up what all the research has shown: 0.05% BAC is, in fact, impaired.
We called Sen. Lovick to tell him about our highly unscientific experiment. He was amused. Lovick first introduced his bill when he was still in the House in the early 2000s. He’s never given up, and says he won’t give up on trying to pass it. It passed the rules committee, so it should come up for a floor vote next session.
The hospitality industry may not agree, but Lovick says lowering the BAC is as common sense as his click-it-or-ticket law the Legislature passed more than two decades ago. Pass this bill and fewer people will die. Why then does it fail, in his opinion?
“All I can tell you is this,” he says. “People hate change and they hate the way things are.”
