It was a beautiful October day when she got arrested.
In 2014, a New York schoolteacher was detained near Buffalo for erratic driving. A Breathalyzer test revealed a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. She failed other sobriety tests, too.
A few months later, the court dropped her drunk driving charges. Her defense? Auto-brewery syndrome. She wasn’t drunk because she drank alcohol, it was because she made the alcohol. Her own gut was fermenting ethanol and intoxicating her.
It almost sounds too convenient, like a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it’s not fiction — it’s science. And, while this is a rare condition, it might happen more often than we think.