Study: Just One Beer or Glass of Wine Can Make You Too Drunk to Drive

We all know better than to drive drunk, or even when we’ve been drinking a bit, but most of us have probably been going under the assumption that a single beer or a small glass or two of wine won’t have any effect on our driving ability — and certainly won’t exceed the legal limits for blood alcohol.

Bad news for those who take a little tipple before getting behind the wheel: While U.S. law now classifies anyone with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08% or higher as too drunk to drive, a new study from the University of Sussex in England has found that even a single drink can leave a driver’s “sense of agency” (feeling of being in control and aware of consequences) to be “significantly compromised.” This is worth noting, since drunk driving remains among the most dangerous behaviors in the cities where the most people die in car crashes.

As reported in the paper “Effect of alcohol on the sense of agency in healthy humans,” published in the journal Addiction Biology, researchers gave some 59 healthy male and female social drinkers either a non-alcoholic placebo or one of two doses of ethanol (beverage alcohol) — 0.4 and 0.6 grams per kilogram, proportioned to the subjects’ body mass index to produce BACs within legal driving limits in England and Wales.

According to one author of the study, Professor Aldo Badiani, director of the Sussex Addiction Research and Intervention Center (SARIC), even though the amount of alcohol ingested was minimal “we still saw an impairment in [the subjects’] feeling of being in control.” Though further research is needed, the authors conclude that their findings “might have implications for social and legal responsibility related to alcohol use, particularly in states prior to overt intoxication.

While not getting behind the wheel is the only sure way to stay safe if any amount of alcohol has been consumed, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to face the side effects of a night of drinking? It may soon be possible as scientists are working on this one way to get drunk without the ill effects.