Crystal clear
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
The balloon will be going up at a lot of parties this autumn. With the police ready to pounce with their Alcotest 'breathalyser' kits, the newly discovered breed of social drinkers will be convivially exhaling into Drink-O-Meter bal- loons or Alcolor plastic bags. 'Oh, look at mine, George. I only had a teensy-weensy Chartreuse and it's gone all green.'
The new game of spot the drunkard can be played for 3s 6d a time with the American Drink-O-Meter (sold by Selfridge's, and I hear likely to be stocked by Woolworth's), or for 5s with the much more convenient Alcolor from East Germany. This is sold appropriately by Henekey's wine bars and the Finlay tobac- conist chain. It's a cruder version of Alcotest (West German, and not yet on sale to the drinking classes), consisting of a closed glass tube containing yellow crystals (the identity of which none of the sellers appeared to know), a mouthpiece, a plastic bag with a narrow neck, and a file for sawing the sealed ends off the tube. In this poor man's breathalyser the
mouthpiece and the plastic bag are a sloppy fit and a lot of breath goes astray.
' The Drink-O-Meter, however, is worse. First you have to unplug the ends of the narrow tube and empty out some white crystals. They do not always all fall out first time but con- tinue to trickle out as you operate it. The next stage is to blow up an orange sausage balloon and `let air from balloon flow through colour tube in exactly one minute.' I tried three of these wid found it difficult to get the air to go through ak all, even by squeezing the balloon to bursting point. Yet Which? said of this apparatus last year that it was 'slightly less convenient to use than the other two.' In fact, it is damnably - awkward to use, especially compared with the beautifully engineered Alcotest which comes in a box designed to hold neatly all the equipment for ten tests and which will, when marketed, cost about 4s a blow.
The Sun recently reported the breath tests of a sample of drivers who included a young woman, who turned the whole tube green after one gin, and a fifty year old advertising execu- tive, whose breath did not discolour the tube at all after nine whiskies with his pub lunch. The pet criticism of breath analysis is that it proves only how well a particular metabolism can deal with alcohol, and is a shaky guide to driving competence.
The Sun's tests failed sixty-four out of 100 motorists tested with Alcotest tubes after the pubs had closed, but they did not follow up with more decisive blood or urine tests to see how accurate the preliminary breath test had been. In West Germany follow-up tests showed that 95 per cent of those who failed a breath test also failed a blood test.
What worries me is that the response to alcohol vapour may differ from one make of tube to another just sufficiently to mislead a driver right into the police trap. Which? said that all three types read below the Kitagawa- Wright standard used by the Medical Research Council working party for an 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres blood content, but added that they all appeared to record similar re- actions. However, I notice that the discoloration is uneven and the green stain may be above the yellow line on one side of the tube and below it on another. I also managed to dis- colour a tube slightly after drinking comminu- ted orange juice (juice with the peel liquidised into it). Ribena, contrary to rumour, does not appear to do this.
But the upshot of all this was that I do not completely trust these breath-testing tubes, and fear that drinkers who start doing their own tests, and then driving because the crystals say that they can, may be in for an unpleasant surprise along the road when the nights are drawing in again.
One whimsical thought—will breathalysers be served at dinner parties, with the coffee? And if the answer is not a lemon yellow crystal- clear tube but a nasty green stain right beyond the line, will they whip away the old brandy and just leave us the After Eights? I wonder, because we inflicted a series of tests after lunch and dinner on a captive couple on four sepa- rate occasions. They ate and drank precisely the same each time (she ate a little less, possibly) but their breath results were not always the same: he failed three out of four, and she failed one. He weighs about twelve and a half stone and she is about four stone lighter, which rather disproves the size theory of alcohol absorption, and also dents the idea that a meal makes it safe to drink copiously.
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