Dooyoo drink & drive? (Drink and Drive?!)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	Drink and Drive?!
Date:	11/02/01 (550 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There are no advantages to drinking & driving.

Disadvantages: Too many to list and obvious anyway.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of people are against drinking and driving. Only an idiot gets into a car after having a skinfull and drives home and I have never personally driven while knowingly over the limit. It’s the word knowingly that concerns me.

The problem with the current law is that nobody who likes the occasional drink knows for sure whether they are drinking and driving. It is said that the current limit allows people to drink around one and a half pints and still pass a breath test, two pints however may well be borderline. These estimated “accepted” limits are hardly scientific and do not take into account how tall someone is, their weight, if they are regular drinkers etc. I know people who very rarely drink apart from at Christmas and birthdays. If this sort of person has just one pint and then drives home surely they are much more likely to have their driving affected by alcohol than someone who is a fairly regular drinker and has drunk two pints. The ridiculous thing about this is that the person who has only had a single pint may well pass the breath test and the other one fail it. Surely the whole reason for bringing in drink driving laws was to improve safety on the roads, this example shows that the present laws clearly do not always work in the best way to achieve this.

Another major grey area is people who drive into work the morning after a party the night before. The vast majority of these will have realised they were going to have a few drinks and decided to leave the car at home, choosing to get a taxi instead. Depending on how many drinks they had, what time they stopped drinking and whether they have eaten food, a proportion will still be over the limit while others will then be under it. The question is – how do you know and are we really saying that somebody who is a fraction over the drink drive limit as a result of alcohol that is still in their blood from the previous n
ight, is as guilty as another person who has four or five pints between 9PM to 11PM at the pub and then drives home? At least in the first example the driver has had the good sense to not drive on the night out.

Another factor that bugs me when discussing this subject is the concentration on the statistics of how many people are killed by people who have been drink driving. As I said before, I neither condone it or do it myself but it is clear from the statistics that the vast majority of accidents, and people killed as a result, actually occur between drivers that have not been drinking or rather are not over the limit. It seems a pity to me that the authorities and the police don’t spend a bit more of their time and efforts in ridding the roads of terrible drivers AS WELL as drink drivers. We’ve all seen the TV programmes which show drivers doing crazy things or people who are on the run after stealing a car. At the end of the clip they usually tell you how long they were banned for or what fine/points they received. These penalties are absolutely pathetic and should be at least as high as that for drink driving, as in these cases the driver has proved on film that they are dangerous or reckless. It’s not only while they’re mobile. Regularly people park their cars outside their house on grass verges or on the road near a corner, even if they’ve got a garage, this can be really dangerous but how many times do the police ever bother to sort out this situation.

So what solutions or suggestions would I offer which I believe would help to improve the situation? Well I think we ought to be more honest about drinking and driving. Drinking is a legal activity and a high proportion of the population do it. There is also similarly high proportion of the population that drive and it is the responsibility of society and the authorities that oversee it, ie the Government, to bring in laws that try to ensure that doing too muc
h of the former does not have a detrimental effect on the latter, with sometimes catastrophic consequences. A complete ban on drinking and driving, meaning an absolutely nil tolerance for alcohol content in the blood, is not a realistic option. Many foodstuffs and products, such as moutwash, already contain a small proportion of alcohol and the body makes its own anyway so nil is just not possible. Apart from this, the problem mentioned before about knowing when all the alcohol had left your body after a drinking session would be made alot worse.

My personal favourite would be to install an alcohol breath tester built into all cars which would disable the engine if the driver did not pass the test and be under an agreed limit (in my view about 75% of the current limit - similar to many parts of Europe). I believe there is a similar device that some Scandinavian countries currently use. Obviously this would not be fool proof, what if two or more people are insured to drive the car or somebody's ten year old son does the test for them, are just two examples. Perhaps making any offence committed to deceive the machine the equivalent of driving while disqualified is a possible answer. At the very least it would encourage the big breweries to install similar machines in pubs to allow people to test themselves to make sure they will be able to get home.

Talking of breweries, why do they tend to build new pubs on the outskirts of towns or in small villages which mean people will often either have to drive to them, or get an expensive taxi? And why do they make soft and low alcohol drinks so expensive that they almost encourage drivers to drink alcohol?

At the end of the day this subject is one of personal choice and responsibility in choosing not to drink and drive, coupled with the right laws being in place to ensure that those who make the wrong choice are both discouraged from doing so and punished when they do. We should not lose sight
of the fact that the main purpose of drink drive laws is to make our roads safer and it is from this principal we should consider our future legislation rather than trying to catch as many people as possible after doing it.

Prevention is much better than cure, in this case.

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