Testing one’s blood alcohol content before the DUI

“How dry I am, how wet I’ll be, if I don’t find the bathroom key.”

Not so very long ago, the urge to go was the first clue that we’d had too much to drink at a bar, party or concert. Other telltale signs? The inability to walk a straight line or finish a thought. And irrepressible laughter when watching an Adam Sandler movie.

Then there were the really glum signals – being arrested for DUI or, by far the worst, getting into an accident. That could leave you with a lifetime of regret, expensive legal fees, a suspended license or even jail time.

But today there’s a safer, scientific and even fun way to monitor inebriation, thanks to personal-breathalyzer pioneer Keith Nothacker, the Penn grad behind the industry-leading BACtrack brand.

How helpful are these gizmos? Current BACtracks claim a level of scientific accuracy close to the professional-grade, $10,000 breathalyzers found in police stations. Yet BACtracks can be small enough to dangle on a keychain and cost about the same ($29.99 for a BACtrack Go) as a good case of beer or bottle of Scotch.

Gizmo Guy’s even more taken with Nothacker’s Bluetooth connected Vio and Mobile models ($49.99-$100 at Amazon, Costco, Best Buy, Pep Boys, AutoZone and more) that feed enhanced information and guidance to a smartphone (Android, iOS) and, soon, the Apple Watch.

Cheap knockoffs, also spotted on Amazon, which cost just a few bucks, are uniformly panned. More reliable are single-use testers with color-changing crystals ($2.50 at breathalyzers.com).

There’s no excuse not to carry a good tester when you’re barhopping. And why not tuck one in your pocket for picnicking long and hard on Memorial Day, or partying at one of the summer’s many outdoor music festivals?

“Would you drive a car that doesn’t have a speedometer?” pondered Nothacker. “That’s the level of disadvantage we all used to have, that first got me thinking and working on this product as a student at Penn (circa 2001). Today, our sales aren’t seasonal, they’re year-round. Truthfully, there isn’t a day when you shouldn’t be drinking and acting responsibly.”

Taking a reading of your drunken state is easier than whistling.

You first breathe in, then out into a plastic-tipped (replaceable) mouthpiece as cued by a beep and, on connected models, with a clock-style display on an app-loaded smartphone.

Internal circuitry takes a measure of your “deep lung” air to calculate the level of alcohol absorbed into your bloodstream.

Although penalties differ in various jurisdictions for lower levels of intoxication, it’s pretty certain that a measured blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 – that’s 8/100ths of 1 percent alcohol in the bloodstream – will get you locked up.

You should not administer a breathalyzer test (nor should police) until at least 15 minutes after your last consumption of drink or food. It takes that long for the alcohol to get out of your mouth, into your bloodstream.

This story was originally published March 30, 2015 at 1:41 PM with the headline "Testing one’s blood alcohol content before the DUI."