[The Fountain] The virtue of drinking in moderation

I will start by not forgetting the virtue of drinking less and in moderation.

SHIM SAE-ROMThe author is a communication team reporter of the JoongAng Holdings. The judiciary has recently made decisions on driving under the influence cases involving entertainment industry insiders. Such cases were particularly frequent last year. Actor Kim Sae-ron was sentenced to a fine of 20 million won ($15,000) in the first trial on April 5. On the following day, the prosecution sought two years in prison for Shin Hye-sung, 44, a member of the boy band Shinhwa.

Under the current law, penalties and punishments are based on the blood alcohol level. Punishments vary depending on the level — 0.03 percent, 0.08 percent, and 0.2 percent — from license suspension or revocation to fines or prison sentences. The blood alcohol level of Kim — the actor who caused an accident in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul, last year — was 0.227 percent, which makes her subject to the highest level of punishment.

While there is an individual difference, how drunk was she at the time? Yoon Joong-jin, a former head of the National Forensic Service, categorized “the degree of clarity according to the blood alcohol level” into five stages: weak, mild, moderate, high and severe.

Here, 0.25 to 0.35 percent (high) refers to the condition in which it is “difficult to walk due to an evident lack of mobility, completely obscure in speech, decreased physical reflex function, sensory paralysis, and confusion of consciousness, and sometimes leading to coma.”

In short, the actor drove in a state in which she had difficulty walking, and if she had drunk more, she could suffer a “severe coma” with decreasing body temperature, slower breathing, and loss of reflex and consciousness, according to Yoon.

Drunken drivers insist on driving when they can hardly move at will because of “frontal lobe paralysis.” A neuropsychiatrist told me on a phone call, “Drinking paralyzes the frontal lobe of the brain like dementia,” and “the most common phenomenon in this state is loss of self-control over social taboos.”

This is why not only drunk driving but also sexual harassment and violence easily occur under the influence of alcohol. Shin Hye-sung is a repeat offender with a record of DUI since 2007. As he refused to be tested, he was indicted on charges of violating the Road Traffic Act and operating a vehicle illegally.

Fortunately, social awareness of DUI has increased over the past decade. In the early days of my career as a reporter, reporters covering the police had a saying, “If you are caught, don’t blow into the tester and call.” If you do that now, you can get into bigger trouble. The movie “Another Round” (2020) sets a hypothesis that humans are relaxed and happy when maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent. But the movie ends in tragedy. I will start by not forgetting the virtue of drinking less and in moderation.