A number of drink-driving acquittals have resulted from a rare condition known as auto-brewery syndrome, in which a person’s gut effectively brews alcohol inside the body.
One man was charged with drink driving after crashing his truck and spilling 11,000 salmon onto a highway in Oregon. Another was secretly recorded by his wife, who was convinced he was a closet alcoholic. And in Belgium, a brewery worker was recently pulled over and given a breathalyser test, which said that his blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit.
There are a few examples of people having blood alcohol readings significantly over the limit without having a drop of alcohol.This week, the man in Belgium was acquitted of a drink-driving offence – he wasn’t a boozer, the court found; his body was essentially making its own beer. The condition has been studied in some capacity for more than a century. When a person with the syndrome ingests carbohydrates, fungi in their gastrointestinal tract converts it into ethanol. The process brings on all the normal effects of inebriation – lack of co-ordination, memory loss, aggressive behaviour – without the alcohol consumption.
In Belgium, the brewery worker – a 40-year-old man who wishes to remain anonymous, according to his lawyer – was pulled over by the police in April 2022 and registered a blood alcohol reading that was more than four times the legal limit. A month later, he was pulled over again and registered more than three times the limit.
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