Scientist: You Can't Get Drunk On Beer
A Yale professor of physiology has scientifically proven that's impossible to get drunk on beer. It's true! The numbers don't lie! So drink away, citizens—at work, at home, at breakfast, anytime! Of course, there's a catch: this scientician decided this in 1955, when things were simultaneously much more uptight and also sooo much cooler.
Dr. Leon A. Greenberg, Yale professor of physiology, said beer isn't [intoxicating] – and should be reclassified to the non-intoxicating drinks.
This brought emphatic objection from other scientists. They wanted to know if the man who is "high" or "tight" isn't also drunk. Beer certainly makes people "high" and "tight," they said.
That's a good question! It depends on what this "high" or "tight" man is drinking?
For people to show consistently the "abnormal behavior" which goes with intoxication, the alcohol content of their blood must be 0.15 per cent or higher.
THE AVERAGE alcohol content of American beers is 3.7 per cent by weight. In order for the alcohol blood level to be at 0.15 per cent, there would have to be two and one-half quarts of 3.7 beer in the stomach. But the capacity of the human stomach is one and one-half to two quarts.
Therefore, no one can drink enough beer at one time to get intoxicated, according to theory. As for doing it by degrees: beer is destroyed or eliminated in the body at the rate of one-third of a quart an hour. So three quarts would have to be consumed in two or three hours, and this, he said, was "physiologically unnatural."
See? It's air-tight. Back when 0.15 was considered, like, almost drunk. The good old days. Also it's totally true! We fiddled around with this handy intoxication calculator and we'd need to down 5 beers in one hour to get to like 0.11. And we'd still be legal to drive home to 1955! Thanks, science!