Partition Ratio Can Make A Breath Test Result Twice As High Or Half as Much As The Actual Blood Alcohol Level.

No One Including Me Wants Drunk or Impaired Drivers Out On The Road: But the facts are AMerica gives out 1.6 Million DUI citations a year and the vast majority of those were stopped for a routine traffic infraction – in other words they were driving just fine when they were stopped; then magically the officer declared them “Impaired” based on roadside physical agility tests that have NEVER BEEN TESTED ON SOBER PEOPLE AS A CONTROL GROUP! This is fundamentally unfair to the sixty year old who had a glass of wine and two hip replacements, to the housewife who admitted that she took a sleeping pill as directed the night before; judging people impaired by using absolutely unproven physical balance tests and nothing else is abhorrent to the American system of justice – period. ANd it doesn’t solve the problem of DUI deaths which are the genesis of the entire witch hunt; that is – stopping people for routine traffic infractions rather than control issues (all over the road- unable to stay in one lane) and then pronouncing them “Too Impaired To Safely Operate A Motor Vehicle” on the basis of completely unproven agility tests that they have never done before – when there is NO baseline that says “x % of sober people can pass these tests” – is the definition of arbitrariness.

Your Breath Test BAC Differs Greatly From Your Blood BAC! Something Called “Partition Ratio Determines What Your Breath BAC Will Be : Which Differs From Your BLood BAC (which is what the law is based on!). Simply put, it is a scientific fact that actual Partition Ratio (P/R) in humans varies widely, from 1500:1 to 3300:1. Fact: a person with a P/R of 1500:1 will have a breath alcohol level of .160 when their actual blood alcohol level is a .05 – that’s right – the breath result doubles in about 16% of the population. How do you know your partition ratio? You don’t –  the best you can do would be to test breath vs. blood  during three hours following alcohol ingestion sufficient to bring you to about .05 blood alcohol concentration (BAC), and compare that with your breath alcohol concentration (BrAC).

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AND HERE ARE THE SCIENTIFIC PAPERS TO BACK THESE CLAIMS UP:

Borkenstein et al. Statement, Ad Hoc Committee on the Breath/Blood Alcohol Relationship. Indianapolis Ind.U.law School Jan 1972. Dave’s Plain Language Summary: Borkenstein, Dubowski, Forney, Sr., Harger, Goldber announced the partition ration principle that has governed breath alcohol analysis in America for the past fifty (50) years since its inception: THERE IS NO OTHER COMPARABLE “RUSE” IN FORENSIC SCIENCE USED IN THE LEGAL ARENA THAT CAN MATCH THE REFUSAL OF BREATH MACHINE MANUFACTURERS TO RELEASE THEIR “SOURCE CODE.” (The Source Code governs how the machine calculates your breath BAC number).Giguiere & Simpson, Medicolegal Alcohol Determination: In Vivo Blood/Breath Ratios as a Function of Time, Proceedings of the 27th Meeting of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists 494 (Oct. 1990). Dave’s Plain Language Summary: Alcohol Absorption Averages 50 minutes but can take as long as 100 minutes with decreased motility, resulting in an increased and erroneous breath alcohol level when the subject is tested three to four hours after drinking, or attempting to “sober up.” Jones, Viability of the blood: Breath Alcohol Ration in Vivo, 39(1) Journal of Studies on Alcohol 1931 (1978). The blood:breath alcohol ratio, commonly used to translate the result of breath alcohol analysis into the co-existing blood alcohol concentration, varies from person to person and within one person over time. Labianca, `The Chemical Basis of the Breathalyzer, 67 Journal of Chemical Education 259 (1990). Labianca, The Flawed Nature of the Calibration Factor in Breath-Alcohol Analysis, 79 Journal of Chemical Education 1237 (2002). Mason and Dubowski, Alcohol, Traffic, and Chemical Testing in the United States: a resume and some remaining problems. Clin.Chem 20:126-140, 1974. Mason and Dubowski, Breath -Alcohol Analysis: Uses, Methods and Some Forensic Problems: Review and Opinion. 21 Journal of Forensic Sciences 9 (1976). Dave’s Plain Language Summary: The conversion of breath results to blood results is inherently flawed due to wide variations in post-absorptive and pre-absorptive tests, and thus these scientists favor total abandonment of the current scheme which is inherently unfair. Tsukamoto etal., An Experimental Study on the Ethanol Concentration Ratios of Breath to Body Fluid, 25 Nihon University Journal of Medicine 281 (1983). Dave’s Plain Language Summary: Abandon the breath to blood conversion, retrograde extrapolation has too many factors to be reliable, and there is no way to insure that partition ratio has ANY real relation to actual ratios which vary greatly due to human physiology. Partition ratio varies greatly between people, particularly between the absorption phase and elimination phase.