Medicine: Drinks for Drivers

On no less an authority than that of Yale (“Drink Her Down”) University, it was argued last week that a highball, a Martini or three glasses of beer could be consumed on an empty stomach without impairing its owner’s ability to drive a car. Double the amounts could be taken after eating.

Dr. Howard Wilcox Haggard, director of Yale’s Laboratory of Applied Physiology, deplores drunken driving, believes that a combination of “science, law and common sense . . . [will] diminish alcoholic motor fatalities.” In The New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Haggard and assistants Leon A. Greenberg and Louis H. Cohen held up their end of the combination and offered legal advice to police, simple physiological advice to drivers.

When concentration of alcohol in the blood is below 0.5 milligram per cubic centimeter (achieved by the highball, Martini or three beers), even the most sensitive drinker displays no ill effects. Above a concentration of 1.5 mgms. every one is drunk. Between these rates lie in dividual variations of sullenness, hilarity, recklessness and melancholy. Hence, Dr. Haggard proposed that police set a stand ard of 0.5 mgm. as the “arbitrary dividing line between sobriety and an appreciable influence of liquor.”