When I “drink” alcohol intravenously, will I (eventually) fail a breathalyzer test?”
The breathalyzer test doesn’t measure how much alcohol went into your stomach; it measure how much alcohol is in your bloodstream. The alcohol in your blood is being exhaled along with everything else coming from your lungs. I would think that if you took in alcohol intravenously that you would test positive for a breathalyzer test even more quickly than if you drank it. With drinking the alcohol has to pass through the stomach before it reaches the bloodstream. I would suggest you stop trying to figure out a way to beat a breathalyzer test and, instead, give up the notion of drinking and driving. Everyone will be much safer if you do. Always have a designated driver or take a cab home. It just isn’t worth it to drink and drive.
Even though you drink the alcohol with your mouth, and the breath test is done with your mouth, it’s really measuring two different things. The breathalyzer measures alcohol in the lungs, and unless you’re doing it very, very wrong, alcohol consumed by mouth does not go straight to the lungs. Instead, the alcohol enters the bloodstream, and as blood goes past the lungs some of it dissolves across the lung membranes, where it will be exhaled. So intravenous alcohol will actually show up on a breath test faster than orally consumed alcohol, since it doesn’t have to pass through the digestive system on its way into the blood. There is “mouth alcohol” to worry about in a breathalyzer test, which is alcohol left in the mouth or belched out from the stomach, and that does show up almost immediately. But if you avoid belching, the mouth alcohol from drinking evaporates in 15-20 minutes. The mouth alcohol can throw off the readings, and it’s not what they want to measure.
