A woman, who requested to be called Sara to maintain confidentiality and protect her legal career, was arrested in 2015 for driving under the influence when she collided with a parked vehicle. It was later determined that she had a blood alcohol content of 0.10 percent. Sara had been arrested for DUI before back when she was an admitted alcoholic. This time, however, was different. Sara, now a recovering alcoholic for nearly ten years, only drank orange juice.
Sara drank orange juice and lots of it, sometimes up to a gallon per day. That orange juice, however, might as well have been alcohol for Sara.
Sara suffers from auto-brewery syndrome. Yes, that is an actual medical condition albeit an extremely rare one. Auto-brewery syndrome causes a person’s body to produce extremely high levels of yeast in the digestive track. If you know anything about how beer is made, you’ll know that yeast eats the sugar that is extracted from boiling grains and then releases carbon dioxide and alcohol. See where I’m going? The yeast in Sara’s system ate the sugars from the orange juice and produced alcohol in Sara causing her to be intoxicated without having a sip of alcohol.
Shortly after she was diagnosed last July, Sara accepted a plea deal for a reduced charge of reckless driving with probation.
Sara estimates that she spent $25,000 fighting the drunk driving charge, with expenses including attorney fees and a privately commissioned polygraph test. She says she chose to take a deal rather than go to trial because a conviction could have been career-ending.
“As soon as I stopped the orange juice, I was fine,” said Sara. “I don’t even tell anyone [about the disorder] because you can almost see them rolling their eyes.”
In 2014, a New York judge dismissed the DUI charge of a woman who was pulled over after a motorist noticed her driving poorly. After police arrived, it was determined that the woman had a whopping 0.33 percent blood alcohol content.
Another characteristic of the disorder is an unusually high tolerance to the alcohol in their system.
The woman’s lawyer hired two physician assistants and a breathalyzer specialist to evaluate the woman over a 12-hour period. They found that the woman’s BAC was double the legal limit at 9:15 AM. At 6 PM, it was triple, and at 8:30 PM, it was four times higher. This was around the same time when the police pulled the woman over for DUI. In other words, her body was producing alcohol consistently throughout the day. Oddly, however, the woman did not exhibit any signs of intoxication until her blood alcohol content reach between 0.30 and 0.40 percent where she would feel dizzy.
Normal people with a blood alcohol content that high are usually unconscious at a minimum, some would be suffering from alcohol poisoning.
“My client does suffer from an extremely unusual condition, and we conducted very extensive medical research and presented our findings to the judge,” said the woman’s defense attorney, Joseph A. Marusak. “To my knowledge, this is the first time a DWI case has ever been dismissed on this basis in New York State, and as far as I can tell, it may be the first time in the country.”
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