Drinking alcohol increases your blood alcohol concentration (BAC), which is what the police measure when they give you a breath test. You can be arrested on DUI charges, even if your BAC is under the legal limit, depending on whether or not the officer thinks you are impaired. But if you reach or exceed that legal limit, it has a major impact on your case because the breath test results can then be used to presume intoxication.
As such, it’s important to remember that your BAC only drops at a rate of about 0.015% per hour, which is much slower than many drivers realize. Some drivers will wait for 30 minutes or even an hour to drive after they’ve been drinking. They assume that this means their BAC is down below the legal limit. But the reality is that it may not have dropped much at all, and it may take hours for that person to get back to a BAC of zero.
Can you speed this up?
Unfortunately, this is just the metabolic rate that your body uses, and there’s not much you can do to increase it or speed up the process of getting sober. Some people will do things like drinking coffee or taking a shower, and these things can wake you up, but they don’t actually change your BAC.
In fact, this issue is why people will sometimes be pulled over on drunk driving charges the next day. If someone stays out late on a Thursday drinking with their friends and then gets up early on Friday to go to work or to go to class at their local college, they may still be technically under the influence while driving the next day. Just sleeping for a few hours may not be enough to reduce their BAC as far as they assume.
If you do find yourself facing drunk driving charges, it’s critical that you understand exactly what legal steps to take and what defense options you have.