Norman Stanley Fletcher
Your company has no duty of care in repsect of what you do when you are off duty, which is presumably when you would have a drink. Its your choice to do it, and you carry the can if by doing so you find yourself over the limit. You will find that a person who's job is to drive is in exactly the same position.
I agree however that you should have access to a discreet way of self testing before you actual do anything that within the new act would drop you in it.
I have to say that the reason I agree is differant for your reason for suggesting it though. My reasons are purly that there is No safe way of calculating what you can drink the night before you fly. Well there is one way, and thats drink nothing.
Everyone's differant and the speed at which they get the alcohol out of thier system verries from person to person, just as the speed at which its absorbed verries. Other factors can speed up absorbtion, like what you have eaten, when you eat it etc. So thats why you can't find anyone to give you guidence.
The drink drive limit equates to about 1 1/4 pints of normal strength beer for an avarage person. But remember that it takes a while to get into your blood, it doesn't happen instantly. So say you had 1.5 pints and blew into a breath test machine 5 minutes later. You would probably have a low reading, but say 30 minutes later, you could have gone up. On the other hand it could take an hour to go up. 2 hours later some of it could have passed out of your system, but there is no reliable way of telling how much so you could still be over the limit. This is why some people provide a positive test when stopped but a negitive test when they arrive at a police station, and why in boarder line cases when a blood sample is taken it is often higher than the breath test reading.
The limits under this act are about 1/4 of the drink drive limits. Personally I wouldn't risk it at all the night before, but then I am not going to be affected.
Something else you should remember, this is nothing new. The same problem has existed for drivers ever since the breath test was introduced.
At the end of the day, the old goverment slogan "think before you drink before you drive", should now be widened to
"Think before you drink, before you drive/fly/try to get your leg over."