One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
Phillips County Coalition for Healthy Choices encourages adults to make one of their New Year’s resolutions for 2015, not to drink alcohol and drive.
Thirty-one percent of all the people who died in motor vehicle crashes during New Year’s holidays, died in crashes involving a drunk driver. That statistic has remained the same for the past 10 years in the United States, according to the National Traffic Safety Administration.
Calculating blood alcohol concentration after drinking isn’t as easy as it seems. Everyone is different, whether it is their gender, weight, number of drinks consumed, types of drinks, size of the glass, how much food they’ve eaten, how much time has gone by, and even their health.
Alcohol is a depressant and can affect judgment in as little as one drink and can also drastically increase aggression in a person. Alcohol moves quickly throughout the body and reaches the brain in about three minutes. It can show up in your blood and breath in as little as half an hour after consuming a drink and may continue to rise for almost an hour after the last drink.
One standard drink is equal to 0.6 oz. of alcohol or one of the following: a 12oz. beer; 8 oz. malt liquor; 5 oz. glass of wine; or a 1.5 oz. shot. The body can only process one standard drink unit in an hour. The body reduces your BAC (blood alcohol content) by .015 in one hour.
Women reach higher BAC’s than men with the same number of drinks because their bodies have less water and more body fat, thus more alcohol remains in their blood. Four drinks in two hours would cause impairment in women compared to five drinks for a man in the same period of time.
This Holiday Season make plans before drinking. Designate a sober driver. Never ride in a vehicle with an impaired driver and don’t let your friends drive drunk. To keep roads safe for everyone report drunk drivers to law enforcement. Above all, make the New Year a safe one and never drink and drive.
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