No wonder you're still drunk when you get up

Linda McAvoy

WHEELS COLUMNIST

It's 8 a.m. — the morning rush — and you've just been arrested for impaired driving.

Thanks to those drinks you had last night, and despite any sleep you may have had, you've just failed the breathalyzer test.

You're still drunk from the night before, hence the handcuffs.

How did this happen?

Well, the physiological explanation goes something like this: when you take a drink, the alcohol goes into your bloodstream where it remains until it's broken down by your liver.

It's up to your liver to do 90 per cent of the work of metabolizing the alcohol; the rest leaves your body when you sweat or go to the bathroom. And your poor liver can't keep up if you're saturated.

Drink faster than your liver can break down the alcohol and your blood alcohol concentration (BAC) can't go anywhere but up.

On average, depending on a person's body type, health, medications and so-on, it can take between 60 and 90 minutes for your body to process the alcohol in a standard drink.

And, yes, there's an app for that. In fact, there are a number of phone applications that can calculate your BAC, based on information the drinker inputs (thus the disclaimers that state these devices are for entertainment and information purposes only).

While a standard drink is usually defined as the alcohol in a bottle of beer, 5 ounces of table wine or 1-½ ounces of hard liquor, "standard" is a relative term depending on the actual concoction you're drinking, who's pouring and even the size of the glass.

Using the rule of thumb that your body needs an hour to metabolize one drink (again, that can differ depending on the person's height and weight), it's obviously going to take a lot longer to get the alcohol out of your system than it did to put it in.

Remember too, your BAC will continue to rise, even after you've taken that last drink.

Which all means that you could stop drinking at 1 a.m., cab it home, hit the mattress, roll out of bed hours later, shower, chug some coffee, and still be impaired for your morning commute.

Thus the presence of roadside spot checks during the a.m. rush.

"We have R.I.D.E.(Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) teams that work around the clock," says Sgt. Dave Woodford of the Ontario Provincial Police. "Impaired drivers aren't limited to specific times of day or year. In order to eliminate the problem, we are focused on doing R.I.D.E. anywhere, anytime, throughout the year, throughout the day."

And no, there's no secret to sobering up.

Contrary to popular belief, cold showers and exercise won't help and coffee will only make you a wide-awake drunk.

It takes time and your liver.

Finally, sober but feeling hung over?

Instead of climbing behind the wheel, you'd better call a cab or catch the bus.

With that pounding headache and sour stomach, not to mention your sour mood, you are one tired, dehydrated, unfocused mess. It's not exactly the best time to be driving.

In fact, researchers at England's Brunel University have concluded that driving while suffering from a hangover is four times more dangerous than driving sober.

The hung-over people who participated in the study (they used driving simulators) were found to be speeding, drifting from their lanes four times as often as sober drivers and committing double the number of traffic violations generally.Meanwhile another study, published in the March 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research looked at the next-day effects of bourbon versus vodka.

Interestingly, while the researchers at Brown University found that bourbon hangovers were worse (possibly because the whiskey contains higher levels of congeners, essentially toxic molecules that are byproducts of the fermentation process), they also concluded that the level of performance impairment in next-day tasks was about the same for both beverages.

When hung over, people did worse in tasks that required them to pay attention for a continuous period of time while making rapid accurate choices, which the study's author, Prof. Damaris J. Rohsenow, points out has implications for driving and safety-sensitive occupations.

"However, people were not aware that they were performing worse, since they thought their driving ability was not impaired in the morning even though they could not react as well."

But, thanks to all those hung-over test subjects who suffered for the sake of science, we are now aware of just exactly how those alcoholic beverages can affect us.

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