Massachusetts DWI DUI OUI Field Sobriety Test Police Training Manual

in the stomach will begin to break down chemically before it ever gets into the blood. In time, as the digestive process continues, the pylorus will begin to relax, and some of the alcohol and food will pass through. But the overall effect will be to slow the absorption significantly. Because the alcohol only slowly gets into the blood, and because the body will continue to process and eliminate the alcohol that does manage to get in there, the drinker’s BAC will not climb as high as it would have if he or she had drunk on an empty stomach.

Distribution

Once the alcohol moves from the stomach into the blood, it will be distributed throughout the body by the blood. Alcohol has an affinity for water. The blood will carry the alcohol to the various tissues and organs of the body, and will deposit the alcohol in them in proportion to their water contents. Brain tissue has a fairly high water content, so the brain receives a substantial share of the distributed alcohol. Muscle tissue also has a reasonably high water content, but fat tissue contains very little water. Thus, very little alcohol will be deposited in the drinker’s body fat. This is one factor that differentiates alcohol from certain other drugs, notably PCP and THC, which are very soluble in fat.

The affinity of alcohol for water, and its lack of affinity for fat, helps explain an important difference in the way alcohol affects women and men. Pound for pound, the typical female’s body contains a good deal less water than does the typical man’s. This is because women have additional adipose (fatty) tissue, designed in part to protect a child in the womb. A Swedish pioneer in alcohol research, E.M.P. Widmark, determined that the typical male body is about 68% water, the typical female only about 55%. Thus, when a woman drinks, she has less fluid—pound for pound—in which to distribute the alcohol.

If a woman and a man who weighed exactly the same drank exactly the same amount of alcohol under the same circumstances, her BAC would climb higher than his. When we couple this to the fact that the average woman is smaller than the average man, it becomes apparent that a given amount of alcohol will cause a higher BAC in a woman than it usually will in a man.

Elimination

As soon as the alcohol enters the blood stream, the body starts trying to get rid of it. Some of the alcohol will be directly expelled from the body chemically unchanged. For example, some alcohol will leave the body in the breath, in the urine, in sweat, in tears, etc. However, only a small portion (about 2—10%) of the ingested alcohol will be directly eliminated.

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