Sober for 20 Years, He Was Arrested Twice for Drunk Driving

Sober, but arrested twice

He hasn't had a drink in 20 years, and the police have just arrested him for drunk driving. For the second time. Later that day, he lands in hospital with a breathalyzer reading above 0.41 percent, about five times the usual U.S. driving limit. In the hospital he drinks nothing, and the number keeps rising.

The alcohol in his blood is real, and nobody can tell him where it comes from. And even after his doctors find it, it will put him in intensive care. This is a real case. His doctors published it in the medical journal Cureus in 2019. You'll get the clues they had, one at a time, and a chance to solve it before the answer.

He's in his mid-forties, and he quit drinking 20 years ago. To understand the day of that arrest, we have to go back to August 2015.

The first seizures

That August, he has surgery on the wall inside his nose. Afterwards, he gets antibiotics and steroids. Remember those antibiotics. Two months later, in October, he has a string of seizures, and he looks drunk. A heavy drinker who stops all at once can have seizures, so his doctors suspect he's a "closet alcoholic," a secret drinker.

They treat him for alcohol withdrawal. He quit 20 years ago, and now he's being treated for quitting.

What his wife saw

Over those months, his wife watches it happen at home. His speech slurs. His eyes go glassy. She can smell alcohol on his breath. He starts a sentence, and it stops making sense. He loses his balance, and he falls, again and again. Every sign points to drinking. She and her husband insist he hasn't touched a drop.

Behind the wheel

A year after the first seizures, he has major dental surgery. He gets another antibiotic. And his episodes get worse. To anyone watching, he looks drunk. The police pull him over again and again for unsafe driving. So before he drives, he tests his own breath with a breathalyzer. He's a man who doesn't drink, checking whether he's drunk.

It doesn't help. One day the lights flash in his mirror again, and this time the officer arrests him for drunk driving. His blood alcohol is two to three times the legal limit.

Arrested again

A month later, he's arrested again. This is the day we started with. In the hospital, nobody gives him a drink, and his blood alcohol keeps climbing anyway. The staff treat him for being drunk and send him home, with no explanation for the

The meal pattern

number. Then he and his wife notice a pattern. The episodes seem to follow his meals. So he starts skipping most of them, going hungry to stay sober. In December 2016, he goes into a hospital to have his levels checked somewhere he can't get a drink. He denies taking any unusual pills, chemicals or herbal remedies, and he denies drinking.

He stays more than a day, and the hospital charts his meals against his blood alcohol. At noon, he eats three beef empanadas. By the time he's admitted at two-thirty, there's alcohol in his blood. By early evening, it's almost gone. At nine-thirty, he eats some high-carb snacks. By midnight, it's back.

By two in the morning, with nothing to eat since the snacks, almost none is left. It looked like secret drinking. It wasn't. His alcohol rose and fell with his meals, in a building where he couldn't get a

No answers

drink. So where is the alcohol coming from? He goes from one medical center to the next. They tell him there isn't much they can offer, and he leaves each one without a diagnosis. More than a year after the first seizures, he still has no name for what's happening to him. His wife refuses to give up.

She keeps searching, and thanks to her, he finds a doctor who recommends the right test.

The sugar test

It's a sugar test. Staff watch him take a large dose of sugar by mouth, around 100 to 200 grams, then measure the alcohol in his breath or blood at set times. Through his whole stay under watch, his alcohol level rises and falls. His urine holds alcohol breakdown products, the same ones labs use to prove someone has been drinking.

On paper, he's a drinker. No lab test can tell alcohol your body made from alcohol you drank. Only a test under watch can show where it comes from. To be certain, he does the sugar test again at another center. The plan is to watch him for 24 hours, and any trace of alcohol would count. One hour in, his blood alcohol is over 0.4 percent, about where it stood on the day of his second arrest.

The staff stopped the test.

Case file: your guess

Pause here if you want to solve it yourself. You have the clues his doctors had. Each course of antibiotics came before a turn for the worse. His breath and blood carry alcohol he never drank. Even in a hospital where he can't get a drink, his alcohol rises and falls. The episodes come after meals, especially carbs.

And a load of sugar sends his level past 0.4 percent within an hour. Whatdunit? His liver? Something in his food? Or something growing inside him? Leave your guess in the comments.

Fourteen months

A DNA test of his stool turns up Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer's yeast. About 14 months after his first seizures, he finally has a name for it. It's called auto-brewery syndrome. His own gut has been brewing alcohol. In most people, gut bacteria act as guards and keep yeast like this in check. His doctors think his antibiotics took out those guards and gave the yeast room to spread.

His meals are the fuel. In the gut, where there's little oxygen, yeast turns sugar into ethanol, the alcohol in beer. His stomach and small intestine soak it into his blood. That's why the sugar test sent his level past 0.4 percent, and why a few hours without food left almost none. A larger study from 2026 found that in some patients, gut bacteria can do the brewing too.

If you guessed something growing inside him, you solved it. If you guessed his food, you found the fuel. A 2021 review of published case reports counted just 20 patients like him. Millions of people take antibiotics without anything like this happening. Now they know what's brewing. Stopping it is harder.

He starts a high-protein, low-carb diet, a probiotic and an antifungal drug. Course after course, even at a double dose, his body keeps making alcohol. Then he develops severe vomiting. He lands in intensive care with an inflamed pancreas, and his doctors blame the alcohol his own body is making. On arrival, his blood alcohol is 0.17 percent, more than twice the usual driving limit.

He's critically ill, and he's still making alcohol. A camera passed down his throat finds a second yeast, Candida intermedia, in his stomach and small intestine. That's right where alcohol gets into the blood. So they switch him to micafungin, a different kind of antifungal, given through a vein, in case this yeast resists the first drug.

From then on, every breathalyzer and every blood test shows no alcohol. Afterwards, his gut samples grow bacteria but no yeast. That points to the yeast as the brewer. He goes back to his job and to a normal life. A year later, a little Candida intermedia has grown back, but this time he has no symptoms.

He has frequent checkups, and he keeps a breathalyzer at home. Back when he tested his breath before driving, it didn't stop the arrests. Now it's how he keeps watch. People have brewed beer with yeast for thousands of years. For more than a year, yeast brewed inside him. His doctors published the case so that the next time a patient keeps turning up drunk and denies drinking, a doctor thinks of the gut.

Source

The case report is linked in the description. This video is for education only and is not medical advice. Subscribe for the next case.