I would have been arrested

Last night, I went through one of the coolest experiences I have ever been through. Jason and I went to the police academy to get drunk. That's right, the cops gave us alcohol.

It was all part of this sobriety test for the new recruits on how to identify intoxicated people. I played my part, for sure.

Here's how the night went. When we arrived, they tested our blood-alcohol percentage (which was 0.00%) and asked us what we wanted to drink. We had several options to choose from such as bourbon, rum, gin, and any kind of mixer we wanted. I ended up with rum and diet coke.

From this point on, we were free to drink as much or as little as we wanted to. I want to say that we started drinking around 6:30. They had the Alabama v. Florida game on a few TVs plus lots of cards to keep us busy. Other than the fact that we were in a police academy, it felt like just a normal night out with friends. After a few hours of eating snack mix and having the cops bartend for us, they cut us off. It was about 9:00 at this point. Everyone started to line up at the Breathalyzer to get our BAC tested. Jason and I were at the end of the line. After a couple of minutes, we were told that we were not drunk enough. I mean, how do you respond to that? If you're like us, then it's a challenge. Who better to take a dare from cops about getting more drunk.

Most of the volunteers decided to leave instead of continue further. If you drove yourself, you had to wait until you blew a 0.00% before they would let you leave. If you had a designated driver, then you had to wait until you blew a 0.08% before letting you leave. Otherwise, they could have arrested you for drunk and disorderly. Beforehand, we kept joking that if that happened we were going to show the cop our Breathalyzer print-out to prove it was for science!

So, we kept drinking for a couple more hours until we were good and ready. They tested our BAC but hid the results from us until after we had completed the sobriety tests. Waiting for us downstairs were about 30 recruits eager to test their knowledge on the freshly liquored up volunteers. Even though I was several drinks in, I took this part as seriously as I could have--like I was in trouble for real. Since a lot of people left earlier, we had to be tested four times by four different cops. They asked me to "follow the pen", "walk the line", and "balance on one foot."

I was so convinced that I had passed these tests with flying colors! In my mind, I performed perfectly. Unfortunately, most of the recruits didn't see the same perfection. We went back into the "bar" where they had each name on a white board with several columns of how much we had to drink, what our blood alcohol content was, each test they gave us, and whether or not they would have arrested us.

After drinking 13oz of rum and blowing a .09%, three out of the four cops would have arrested me. Jason had 14oz of bourbon and blew a .10% with all cops arresting him. It was really interesting to see the people who were under the legal limit and yet some of the cops would have arrested them. The recruits who marked the legal-limit drinkers as arrested were told to write down what they did and later they would go over how to correct their errors. Needless to say, we were ready to go home and finally made it out of there around midnight.

You can kinda see Jason and I in the video above. We are the ones walking in at the very end with me in the gray shirt, Jason in the green.