I realize there are lots of factors in translating volume of alcohol ingested into a BAC reading.
Still, acknowledging it won't be scientifically precise, I'm curious. Let's assume the person in question is a male, 5'10" tall, 175 pounds. And he's been drinking at a steady rate for 4 hours....IOW, he didn't just turn a bottle upside down and literally chug the contents.
Just ballpark, how many ounces of alcohol would he have to drink to register a BAC of .47? Since most liquor is 40% to 50% alcohol, you'd need between 2 and 2.5 ounces of liquor to get an ounce of alcohol.
Interesting story (to me)
The only time I ever actually had to get on the witness stand - most see me coming as their nightmare in Darth armor and cop a plea - we ran the numbers on this 29-year-old woman. The story - as told to us - was that she had crashed her vehicle, been brought to the hospital unconscious, woke up on the X-ray table and fled the hospital, figuring she would avoid prosecution as a repeat offender but not realizing EMTs have to take your blood in the ambulance so the doctor knows what's in your body and doesn't kill you trying to save you. In this case, though, she wasn't drawn until arrival while unconscious. The even funnier part is she showed up the next day with a broken collarbone (from the wreck) claiming she had fallen down - and came to the same hospital from which she escaped, which is kinda dumb if you think about it. She went home to "dry out" because she was on a serious probation for mandatory jail time .
She fled the state and went into rehab in Louisiana but eventually we wound up in court. Her BAC - and mind you, this was hours after the fact - was .32 when plugged into the calculation. (Amusing side note: it was on the day Texas played USC for the national title, and I had just come back from break when the sample arrived. I had no idea what was going to happen months later).
She was a skinny young black lady, and when I read the evidence at the direction of the prosecutor, she began wailing and screaming sitting in the chair. She'd been offered a plea deal with something like 16 months of jail time, but she wasn't going to jail in her mind. Her public defender basically wanted to build his case upon, "Well, you weren't there to see the phlebotomist draw the blood, so you have no way of knowing whether she used iodine or alcohol to swab the area to draw the blood?" to which I responded, "No more or less so than any other patient whose labs I run."
Just if you're interested - I'm not giving away privileged information because I just found this but her
appeal is online with some details from the arrest and the court case (though my name isn't in there).
