Sobriety arrests

Driving a car under the influence of alcohol is illegal and penalized with a fine, if not jail time.

A 40-year-old Belgian, however, disputed his drunk driving apprehensions in April and May 2022. A court only recently dismissed the charges against him after doctors diagnosed him with auto-brewery syndrome (ABS) which made him appear to have drank liquor when he had not.

The abnormality causes carbohydrates in the man’s stomach to ferment, increasing ethanol levels in his blood.

When traffic police pulled him over in April and made him take a breathalyzer test, the instrument read 0.91-milligrams of alcohol per liter. The man was again flagged a month later and his breath was found to contain 0.71-mg of alcohol.

The legal limit in Belgium is 0.22-mg per liter of air exhaled, which corresponds to a blood alcohol level of 0.5 grams per liter.

With his condition explained in court, his lawyer, Anse Ghesquiere, said he was acquitted. The ABS-afflicted man is now eating a carbohydrate-light diet to avoid his stomach producing more alcohol.

Meanwhile, some 300 drivers in Oahu, Hawaii were arrested in 2022 and 2023 even though their alcohol levels were below the legal limit of 0.08, including 69 people with results of 0.00, Hawaii News Now (HNN) reports.

The arrests did not result in charges, however, HNN said, citing Hawaii Police Department (HPD) data.

And those arrested, especially those whose test results were 0.00, did not have ABS either.

Jonathan Burge, a former HPD officer who is now a defense attorney specializing in traffic cases, blamed the misapprehensions on the pressure exerted by the HPD on officers to make drunk driving arrests.

Supporting Burge’s observation was data from the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office showing that of 1,283 drunk driving cases the HPD referred to it last year, 1,038 or 80 percent were declined due to weak evidence.

Burge told HNN that arresting non-drunk drivers has repercussions — the drunk guys are left on the road.