:)

Shiny new, sealed in a plastic bag, hygenic mouthpiece. A new one for each test...

it's not hard to plan ahead if you are driving. If you are at a party, and you decided to drive, you don't drink, it's that simple. There's no sense whining about people giving you drinks, and how it's rude to turn them down - because you should have complete control about what you're doing. It's not only your life on the road, if you crash, you can be taking other people with you.

Blaming transit is pointless - because it does not give you an excuse to drink and drive. IF you live in an area that is serviced easily by transit, then you can plan your night around it. If you don't, then you need to plan accordingly. If you want to pay for a taxi ride, then that's fine. If you want to drink, you don't live in an area that's serviced by night transit, you don't want to pay for a taxi, you have two options, you can either move to a different area (if you think that going out partying is that important to you), or you can just not go. It's that simple. It's not being righteous, it's just logical thinking.

This fails Revscene, the bulk of whose populace are children of the "ME! ME! ME!" generation. Logic is irrelevant; they're going to do what THEY want, regardless of anyone else, and any laws to the contrary are just there to annoy them. They're ballin' around in their parents' cars and consider the occasional ticket to be just the cost of doing things their own way.

reassuring to know.. thanks!

wow... well put Soundy.


logic is lacking in many. planning ahead is a foreign concept.

Two quick questions:

1) Are drivers required to be notified of their right to a second test

2) How many people who cause an alcohol related collision blow between .05 and .08 compared to those who blow above .08?

Just got home from hockey and there was a drinking and driving counter attack check. I didn't drink so I had nothing to fear, but this reminded me a long time ago when I was 18 and had been drinking around 8 pm. I stopped drinking by 9 and chilling out sipping on pop till we went home around 1 am. On my way home, I ran into a check and they tested me. I blew into the machine and it was a green light. The officer made me blow a second time, thinking he was sure I was going to fail since I was still pretty red and reeked of alcohol.

Are the officers allowed to ask for a second test on a different device even if the first time was a pass?

Yes, if they considered that you did not provide "a sample suitable for analysis in an approved screening device".

i can't comment if it's a tax grab, but the human rights group did say something that made me think and does make sense.

the laws and the consequences are a bit too harsh, who made the police the judge? police have too much rights now as to if you get caught, you will have to go through A, pay B and then you'll get your car by C. The police are giving too much power. It's usually the judge that decides these things but we have skipped the entire process.
just my 2 cents

How accurate are the handheld devices? What is the chance that someone with a BAC of .04 could blow a warn?

The ASDs are individually tested for accuracy against a known value every couple of weeks.

Not trying to be a dick, but that doesn't quite answer my question :p

It answered the first one quite well, I thought. :)

As for blowing WARN instead of .04, I've tested several people who have provided a .04 sample and not a WARN. Going by that, and the knowledge that the ASDs are tested against known values/quantities/samples, however you want to word it, I'd say the chance is quite low. If your body is on the back-end of processing the alcohol, going from .05 down to .04 doesn't take very long.

That is a *20%* margin of error, after all... I'd think they'd be inherently more accurate than that.

"The" human rights group? Which one? Few of them are what you could consider "impartial".

Technically speaking, the ASD is the judge in this case...

Unlike such other critical human rights issues as your station in life being decided by the color of your skin, NO country or society grants people the RIGHT to drive a car on the public roads. Even in the most liberal places, driving is still considered a privilege.

The roads are built and maintained with everyone's money, and everyone using them should be able to do so safely. To that end, certain laws and rules are put in place. If someone decides they want to live without those rules, then they can make the choice to live without using the public roads... simple as that.

It's hardly a human-rights issue.

It is not a 20% margin of error...what he said was that the human body continues to process the alcohol and the actual mg% readings follow the line of processing. You could be "on the way down" ie..body is getting rid of the alcohol...and show a .05% as that was what your percentage was at that moment in time. Take a reading 30 minutes later and you should expect a lower reading as the disposal of the alcohol goes on. Body mass, food consumption etc all come in to play. If you are "on the way up," then a .05 mg% reading could be a .08 by the time the actual datamaster readings are taken some time later. Once again, the same body mass, food consumption etc also come into play. The new roadsidescreening devices show you the reading in fractions of a percent...eg...50, 49, 48, 47. The ones I used did not show the percentages up to 3 or 4 decimal places..eg. .497552 mg%.

Er... for someone to be 0.04% and the device to read it as 0.05% would be off by 25% (not 20% - went the wrong way... but the idea is the same). My point is, one would expect more accuracy from the ASD than for it to possibly be off by 20-25%.

I think you two mis-understood each other's posts. ;)

Soundy was commenting on the accuracy and zulu was talking about the body's processing of alcohol. ....at least thats my take on the posts. :thumbsup:

For drinking and driving the meter is the judge, not the officer. The officer has no power, he is enforcing what the meter tells him, that you're drunk and should not be driving.

Maybe this will help reassure you...
The accuracy is determined by the calibration of each individual instrument. If it would be out as much as showing .05 when it was .04, the instrument would not pass calibration and would not be used. It would go back to the manufacturer for repairs. The accuracy is measured against a SAS solution, same type as used in the Datamaster.
The difference in readings shown are attributed to what I already stated, not an inaccurate instrument.

I'm on the fence with these new laws. I think it is a little cut and dry, to be honest.

They say you can blow 0.5 with one drink, but let's be honest having a beer at a business meeting at lunch will not ever equate in me being drunk or intoxicated. If you blow over 0.5, but are completely sober, how is that fair? Many people will have a drink at dinner and never be drunk, it's a social thing, how is it fair to turn around and suspend a person's license when they are not even intoxicated? Why is there not a further line of testing to truly determine a person's motor skills at the time in order to confirm if the person is too intoxicated to drive? For example the line test, hand and eye motor skills test, etc. I understand this law cuts the bullshit, but it is way too cut and dry.

My second question, pertains to the test itself. We know that mouth wash for example can skew the test if you recently brushed and swished, this is proven. So would an officer deal with this fact if a motorist posed that question?

Secondly, pulling a chapter from the officer who killed a motorist after driving drunk, and went home and had a drink before being breathalized. How does this law pertain if a person claims they just recently had a sip of alcohol? Is the person then given a certain amount of time in order to retest?

Legitamate questions, so someone like Soundy please kindly piss off with your stupid replies.

You get a 15 min window between drink to having to blow. The meter is not accurate in this range due to booze in your mouth. At my size 1 beer would not even register 0.05 in this 15 min window.

Thus I think everyone is blowing this a little out of proportion. If you chugged a beer then drove, we duh, you're gong to blow over, yet that was a pretty dumb move anyways. If you're having a beer at lunch you'll be fine unless you're ~100 lbs in which case you already know that a beer hits you harder.

Mouthwash is used in the training process. When you take a mothfull and swish it around it regsiters as the alcohol that it is. Wait 15 minutes and it is long gone. The tests I did had it no longer being read after about 5 minutes maximum.

The thing that puzzles me is that the 215 suspension with between .05 and .08 has existed for decades. The only reason that people are getting upset now is that there finally are some real penalties attached to it. I issued hundreds of 215's over the years and people were normally happy to get one instead of blowing over .08 and going back for a breathalizer test...now, all of a sudden, this is an assult on our civil rights?

Part of it before, for me anyways, was that the fear of being pulled over and given the test was low. Hopefully this doesn't get me in trouble :blush:, I've driven home after a hard night of drinking many times. As long as I kept the car at 50 km/h, didn't run any yellow lights, and kept the car from weaving, I thought the chance of being pulled over was low.

Now that 0.05 is the flavour of the month, and this weekend being prime example, there is an increased police presence and the chance of hitting a road check appears to be higher than before. Heck, this past monday at 1am, I stopped at a road check going up SFU, something I've only seen durning Christmas time in the 3 years I've lived here.

And another thing, my co-workers and I are planning to go out for dinner and drinks after work and everyone has agreed to share cabs from work to dinner, and to go home afterwards.