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Comment on Why in America is .08 the legal limit for drunk driving? How come it's not an even 0.10? Who decided at what level being drunk starts? Then 4 beers of 12oz's is 0.08 why is it that small?

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IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Get ready to face DUI charges when you take cough medicine, eat some overripe fruit, or have some yogurt, among other things. Trace amounts of alcohol exist in a number of foods, so you could easily fail a 0.0 test by simply eating breakfast.

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sunsofold@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Don’t cite things on a gotcha response as if it were even momentarily researched.

Police aren’t usually pulling over random people and randomly testing them. If you’re being pulled over for drinking it’s usually because they already suspect something based on your driving. The only exception are checkpoints, but we’ll come back to that.

You would have to be doing something weird even to get a result from almost any of the items listed in your own source. An evidentiary breath analysis unit can read as low as 0.020. The highest ABV in that list (that is food, not an extract) is ~2% for soy sauce. You could drink a pint of that soy sauce, (eeugh!) and by the time the alcohol evaporated from your mouth (it lasts several minutes and would prevent an accurate reading) your BAC would likely be below the detection threshold. Procedure (at least where I was, but likely anywhere) would require a second confirmation test 15 minutes after the first to make sure the first wasn’t caused by oral residue.

So, worst case scenario, you chug a pint of soy sauce in your car, immediately drive up to a checkpoint on the way to a hospital because of the amount of salt, they test you randomly and get a positive result from the oral residue, and then get nothing when they retest unless you are so small and light that you are probably a literal child.
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- PenguinMage@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Hold up, police aren’t randomly pulling people over? That power hungry group of asshats are doing whatever the fuck they want. “Suspicious driving” is their go to fuck you card. Drunk driving is a problem, more unmitigated police power is not the solution.
  
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  - sunsofold@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    It’s not random. It can be malignly motivated by colorism or classism but those still aren’t random. Overreach by those who have been granted a level of power is its own problem, but until we can get a better system going, police are what we have to work with. Pointing out a problem is not enough.
    
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