In a rare episode of a media outlet investigating the multiple problems with the Intoxilyzer 8000 breath testing machine, this piece from Florida is pretty good. It shows a guy whose breath/blood acohol is actually .000. He eats a piece of Wonder Bread and blows a .025! With no alcohol in his system, he still blows numbers just from bread. It also shows videos of a woman being breath tested while also vomiting, something which virtually guarantees a false positive breath test. There is also video of a guy who has alcohol in his mouth, but not in his bloodstream, blow 3 times the legal limit despite not having alcohol in his system and despite the machine having a “slope detector” which is supposed to safeguard against this type of false positive. There are a whole lot of ways for a breath test to go wrong, and this news story shows a few of them.
The Intoxilyzer 8000 is the same machine that is used in every Kansas DUI case. All it takes to put someone in jail is for the machine to spit out a number. A piece of bread, acid reflux, food and/or alcohol trapped in the mouth, a belch – all of these can cause a breath test to be positive when a person is not actually intoxicated. In fact, I recently had a person from the Kansas Department of Health & Environment, the agency in charge of breath testing in Kansas DUI cases, testify that Dr. Pepper can cause a person to blow numbers on the machine! The scary thing is that no one knows why Dr. Pepper and Wonder Bread cause the machine to show that a sober person has been drinking. In Kansas, there is only one breath test and not two as in most states. So, there is not even a second confirmatory test done here to insure that the results are accurate.
The company that makes the Intoxilyzer, CMI, Inc., refuses to sell the Intoxilyzer 8000 to anyone other than the police. I have tried to buy one and been refused. They also refuse to turn over the operator’s manual to the machine. The reason for this secrecy is that they know that there are flaws in the machine and that they could be exposed if scientists and defense attorneys were actually allowed to purchase machines and show things like the experiments done in this video.