Gordon Campbell poses for mugshots after being arrested for driving drunk in Hawaii this weekend. File photo: CP

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell would have to have consumed 10 standard sized alcoholic drinks over eight hours to have exceeded the legal limit for drinking and driving in Hawaii, toxicologists and activists against drunk driving say.

At a tearful press conference on Sunday, Mr. Campbell said that he consumed three martinis and "two or three" glasses of wine over a period of about eight hours and that he made a "stupid" mistake by driving back to his hotel. He was charged last Friday after being pulled over by Maui police.

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• With news of his arrest still making front-page headlines
  Brent Jang reports on the major hurdles the Premier must clear
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• Four days after the incident, the host of the dinner party
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But Andrew Murie, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, doubted the veracity of the Premier's recollection. "If you do the math, there's no way he's telling the truth," he said in an interview.

In fact, Mr. Murie said that, if Mr. Campbell's accounting of his drinking that evening was correct, his reading on the breath-analysis machine would have been 0.015, well below the legal limit of 0.08 (80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood).

"He would have had to drink a hell of a lot to blow over the limit," he said. "So either he had a lot more than six drinks or those were pretty stiff martinis and some big glasses of wine."

Mr. Murie said he believes the Premier was playing down his alcohol consumption that evening to minimize the impact of his transgression in the hope the public will be more forgiving. "Every drunk driver says: 'Oh, I just had a few drinks and made a mistake.' But we're not talking about a little bit of social drinking here. It's dangerous to be behind the wheel at this level of intoxication."

Jatinder Khanna, a professor emeritus of pharmacology at the University of Toronto, also questioned the Premier's recollection of how many drinks he had, and his comprehension of how a drink is defined.

"If he blew over 0.08, given the time frame, this person had to consume eight to 10 drinks and, more likely, at least 10 drinks," he said in an interview.

Dr. Khanna, an international expert on impairment, said if the drink count is correct, each one had to contain far more alcohol than a standard drink served in a bar. (A standard drink is a bottle of beer, a five-ounce glass of wine or 1˝ ounces of liquor.)

Using standard toxicological charts, it is possible to calculate with a fair bit of precision a person's blood-alcohol level, based on their weight, the number of drinks consumed and the time elapsed.

In a statement, Mr. Campbell said he arrived at a dinner party at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday and consumed the drinks between then and 1 a.m. His hosts have said that for the 90 minutes before he left, Mr. Campbell drank only club soda.

He was arrested at 1:30 a.m. Friday after police spotted him driving erratically. A breath test showed that Mr. Campbell's blood alcohol level exceeded 0.08.

Police, however, almost never charge individuals for impaired driving unless the reading approaches 0.1.

Mr. Campbell weighs about 200 pounds (90 kilograms). At that weight, he would absorb about 22 milligrams of alcohol per drink. At the Premier's weight, he would, conservatively, also eliminate 15 mg of alcohol an hour.

Dr. Khanna said that exceeding the legal limit means the equivalent of four to five drinks remain in the person's system. Given there were eight hours between the time Mr. Campbell starting drinking and his arrest, that means he would have been able to eliminate the equivalent of five or six additional drinks.

From this, he deduced that about 10 drinks would had to have been consumed. That number would be even higher if Mr. Campbell's weight were more than 200 pounds or if he were a regular drinker (regular drinkers can eliminate alcohol from the system quicker).

Mothers Against Drunk Driving argues that, with a legal limit of 0.08, a person can drink to excess and still not be charged with impaired driving. The group has been lobbying for the limit to be lowered to 0.05. Opponents say such a move would criminalize social drinking and do nothing to get chronic drunk drivers off the road.

Breath tests are an approximation of the alcohol level in the blood. The ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol is about 2100:1, meaning that 2,100 millilitres of air will contain the same amount of alcohol as one millilitre of blood.

More than 125,000 Canadians are charged with federal drinking and driving offences each year. Nationwide, about 40 per cent of all traffic deaths are caused by impaired drivers.