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Drinkers who absorb that much alcohol, and live to not remember it, ordinarily are women — many of them wiry or petite, Dr. Yasir Ahmad, a Hackensack psychiatrist, told CLIFFVIEWPILOT.COM.
“The highest I’ve ever seen is .5-something,” Ahmad told the PILOT. “She was a small woman, too.”
However, men have a higher percent of water per pound (58%) than women (49%), and are heavier, which can account, in part, for the fact that it takes more alcohol to achieve the same BAC level. Women also metabolize alcohol at a different rate.
Marguerite Engle, 45, was nearly nine times over South Dakota’s legal limit of .08 percent, they said. New Jersey has the same limit.
By crude estimates, she apparently had the equivalent of at least three dozen drinks in her system, give or take a few belts. And that’s on the low side.
Engle was freed on bond after being hospitalized, then failed to show up for her court date, according to the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal.
Police found her Monday night — in another stolen car, drunk, in a ditch near Fort Meade. She’s now being held without bond.
Blood alcohol content, or blood alcohol concentration (abbreviated BAC), is commonly used as a metric of intoxication for legal or medical purposes.
The number of drinks consumed is a poor measure of BAC, largely because of variations in weight, sex, and body fat.
However, according to Wikipedia, “it is generally accepted that the consumption from sober of one standard drink of alcohol (e.g. 14 grams (17.74 ml) ethanol content by U.S. standard) will increase the average person’s BAC roughly 0.02% to 0.05% and would return to 0% about 1 1/2 to 3 hours later.”
And since you’re probably wondering anyway:
A man hit by a car was admitted to a hospital in Plovdiv, Bulgaria in December 2004 with a BAC of 0.914%. Thinking their equipment was on the fritz, doctors conducted FIVE seprate lab tests — all with the same results. The man survived being smashed in both senses.
None months ago, authorities in Skierniewice, Poland reported that a 45-year-old man struck by a car registered 1.23%, which, if accurate, would likely be a world record for a survivor.
According to Wikipedia: “He did not remember neither the accident nor people he drank with.”
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