- June 8, 2016 |
- Category: DUI and Courtroom Process
Imagine being charged with drinking and driving when it’s been days since you’ve had a drink, only to learn from your family doctor that your body brews its own alcohol. That’s what recently happened to a New York woman when she was stopped for drinking and driving and submitted a blood alcohol content (BAC) of more than four times the legal limit. In December 2015, in Hamburg, New York, a judge dismissed DUI/OVI charges after learning the woman suffers from a condition called “auto-brewery syndrome.”
“I had never heard of auto-brewery syndrome before this case,” DUI defense lawyer Joseph Marusak told CNN in January 2016. “I’m in touch with about 30 people who believe they have this same syndrome, about 10 of them are diagnosed with it,” said Panola College Dean of Nursing Barbara Cordell, who has studied the condition for years. “They can function at alcohol levels such as 0.30 and 0.40 when the average person would be comatose or dying. Part of the mystery of this syndrome is how they can have these extremely high levels and still be walking around and talking.”
Auto Brewery Syndrome is also called Gut Fermentation Syndromeis, a relatively unknown phenomenon in western medicine. This syndrome is difficult to research since it goes by several other names but medical journals validate the condition and describe subjects without access to alcohol giving blood samples that contain high amounts of alcohol. Typically, the subjects ate diets rich in carbohydrates or high in fiber. Some of the studies involved children, including a four year-old child who became intoxicated after ingesting a fruit drink loaded with carbs.
In a case study presented by the International Journal of Clinical Medicine, a 61 year old male presented in 2010 with a multi-year history of unexplained intoxication. In 2004, after surgery for a fractured foot, and subsequent treatment with antibiotics, he began to get excessively intoxicated after only two beers, and on occasion he would seem to be extremely impaired even when he didn’t consume any alcohol.
The man’s wife, who is a nurse, began to document this occurrence with an official alcohol breath testing device. Often his blood alcohol content was as high as 0.33 to 0.40, four to five times higher than the legal limit in Ohio and most other states. The couple couldn’t find a cause for these episodes other than a small amount of alcohol ingested from a piece of gum or a piece of candy with a small amount of chocolate liqueur as an ingredient. The episodes were more frequent when the subject missed a meal, exercised or when he ingested alcohol the night before.
The frequency and severity of involuntary intoxication began to increase in the ensuing years. In November of 2009, the subject was taken to a local emergency room on a day when he had not ingested any alcohol. In the ER, his blood alcohol concentration was .37, about four and a half times the legal drinking limit in Ohio. He was admitted to the hospital for observation and treated for severe alcohol intoxication. The physicians were not aware that a person could be impaired without consuming alcohol and therefore believed the subject must be a “closet drinker.” They had never heard of another patient with auto-brewery syndrome.
In April of 2010 the subject was admitted to the hospital for a 24-hour observation period. His belongings were thoroughly inspected to insure he did not have alcohol with him and he was not allowed to see any visitors. The hospital staff administered a breathalyzer to the subject every four hours, and at one point, he blew a .12, which is well above the legal limit for driving a vehicle in Ohio.
So how did the the falsely accused DUI driver from New York figure out she had auto brewery syndrome? Her DUI defense lawyer, Joseph Marusak, set up an experiment. “I hired two physician assistants and a person trained in Breathalyzers to watch her and take blood alcohol levels over a 12-hour period and had it run at the same lab used by the prosecution,” said Marusak. “Without any drinks, her blood level was double the legal limit at 9:15 a.m., triple the limit at 6 p.m. and more than four times the legal limit at 8:30 p.m., which correlates with the same time of day that the police pulled her over.”
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