Coffee and Drunk Driving Do They Mix ?

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Rob McKinney

I have written about the effects of Red Bull and alcohol , but I just read a excellent post by Lawrence Taylor who writes the DUI Blog.here is an excerpt from his post on the effects of caffeine and alcohol

Caffeine and alcohol have a synergistic effect — that is, they combine to produce an accelerated effect. Rather than sobering a person up, as is commonly believed, coffee can actually increase the symptoms of alcohol.

The definitive studies were done by researchers in Great Britain and reported in an article entitled, "Interactions of Alcohol and Caffeine on Human Reaction Time", appearing in the scientific journal Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 528 (June 1983).

The conclusions of the scientists:


"Alcohol has always been categorized as a central depressant and caffeine as a central stimulant. Therefore, it should follow that an antagonistic [counter-active] interaction should occur when these two drugs are ingested simultaneously. But as these results illustrate, this is not necessarily the case…

"Caffeine has a synergistic interaction with alcohol…(It) has the effect of potentiating the detrimental effects already induced by alcohol….Motor skills which involve delicate muscular coordination and accurate timing have been found to be adversely affected by caffeine

This study coupled with the Wake Forrest and University of Florida studies clearly show that the caffeine use magnifies coordination problems which may effect the field sobriety tests.

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DUI Breath Test Results Can be Influenced by Diet

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Rob McKinney

Recently, I had a case with a person on a low carb diet that was arrested for Driving Under the Influence(DUI). The breath test was high for the amount of alcohol she consumed and I remembered the issue of low carb diets and elevated breath tests results. Low carb diets such as the South Beach diet and Atkins diet can increase the acetone in the body. Why is that important?

The breath test machine may confuse the acetone with alcohol. Therefore, it will give a higher reading on the breath alcohol test. In Attorney Lawrence Taylor's blog post, Dieting Can Cause High Breathalyzer Results, he wrote about the effects of dieting and increased breath alcohol levels:

Fasting or radical dieting, such as with the Atkins diet, can also cause significantly elevated acetone. Studies have concluded that fasting, for example, can increase acetone in the body sufficient to obtain breathalyzer readings of .06% (this is cumulative — that is, the .06% will be added by the machine to any levels actually caused by alcohol or other compounds, so that a true breath alcohol of .03%, for example, would be reported by the machine as .09%).

The importance of this fact is, diet and other factors can influence breath alcohol testing levels. Do breath test machines detect this? I don't know. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation doesn't even have an owner's manual for the breath test machines that the citizens of the State of Tennessee have paid for.

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