I got a phone call late Monday afternoon from the desk sergeant, informing me that I was to meet Sgt._____ at 7:30am the next morning to learn how to operate the Intoxilyzer 5000. (Sorry, had to put it in bold since it's such an obnoxiously silly name.) As you might guess, the Intoxilyzer 5000 is the machine used to analyze the breath of suspected intoxicated drivers.

Unfortunately, the class is not simply "Push this button." It's a 40 hour class, where you not only have to learn which button to push, but you have to learn what the principle behind testing a person's breath for blood alcohol content is, be able to recite word-for-word Henry's law (Henry's Law: When alcohol is a part of blood in a closed container (lungs) under constant temperature and pressure, the concentration of the alcohol in the air in contact with the surface of the blood is in proportion to the concentration of the blood. 2.1 liters of alveolar air contains the same amount of alcohol as one (1) cc of blood.), and be able to calculate the amount of ethyl alcohol in a person's system, and from that, calculate how many drinks/beers/glasses of wine the person had. It's a surprising amount of math and physics, which is really throwing some of the people in the class. (Remember, this is a classroom full of cops.) In a way it's rather interesting, because I'd always wondered just how you could measure a person's blood alcohol level by having them blow into a tube. But it really does work, trust me.

Of course, in the class we're also learning some rather disturbing statistics about drunk driving. Nearly half of the drivers who die in crashes have been drinking. Alcohol-related crashes are about nine times more likely to result in death as are similar crashes that don't involve alcohol. It is also conservatively estimated that the typical D.W.I. violator commits the offense about 80 times per year. And an even more distubing fact: in random surveys of drivers stopped during late evening/early morning hours on weekends, approximately 10% had a BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) of .10g% or higher.

Yep, 1 in 10 drivers on the road on friday and saturday nights are legally intoxicated.

So I'm spending the rest of the week in Intoxilyzer school. Unfortunately that means that I won't be going on patrol with my shift this week, but on the other hand, when I do go back on the road I'll be qualified to pull over DWI violators, perform field sobriety tests, and arrest the drunk fools.