I’ve probably never mentioned it before, buy I’m 1/4 Lithuanian. Here’s something one of my cousins sent me to make me “proud” of that heritage:
VILNIUS, Lithuania – Lithuanian police were so astonished by a breath test that registered 18 times the legal alcohol limit, they thought their device must be broken. It wasn’t.
Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood repeatedly on different devices after he was pulled over Saturday for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius.
Lithuania’s legal limit is 0.4 grams per liter.
“This guy should have been lying dead, but he was still driving. It must be an unofficial national record,” Saulius Skvernelis, director of the national police traffic control service, told the AP. “He was of high spirits and grinning the whole time he was questioned.”
Medical experts say anything above 3.5 grams per liter of alcohol in the blood is lethal for most people.
“A person this intoxicated should be in an intensive care unit, not behind the wheel,” said Tautvydas Zikaras, head of the dependence illness center in the country’s second-largest city, Kaunas. Zikaras said he had never heard or read of someone being so drunk.
Personally, I’m not so sure that this is anything to be proud of. It just goes to show that it’s possible to develop an enormous tolerance to alcohol, given enough time. I’m sure that genetics has something to do with it as well. In any case, I’d sure hate to see what this guy’s liver looks like.
