Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal does a very good job in examining the recent strategy disagreements between MADD and the liquor industry's own Century Council. The issue -- which drunk drivers are the most dangerous.Bialik is a good journalist and he certainly tries to remain objective, giving a fair hearing to both sides. But the facts he presents speak for themselves and so I'm sure he isn't surprised that his readers (those who truly care about getting drunks off the roads, anyway) are going to side with MADD.
I certainly do.
What makes a drunken driver really drunk?
That question was highlighted by Mothers Against Drunk Driving's decision Monday to remove a liquor-industry-funded group from a high-profile campaign to prevent drinkers from taking the wheel. The group, called the Century Council, argues on its Web site that hard-core drunken drivers cause most alcohol-related traffic deaths, and therefore any crackdown should focus on them.
But there is a big question about that approach: How do you identify really drunken drivers before it is too late? Drunken drivers are rarely nabbed. When they are caught, it may be after one of their milder binges. And even if they are tested, the legal limits are somewhat imprecise -- one size doesn't fit all...
MADD split with the Century Council because the two groups disagreed about a penalty requiring drivers caught above the limit to install an ignition interlock, a device that prevents those convicted from driving whenever their breath alcohol is too high. The liquor-backed group told several states it only supported this measure for the most hard-core drivers. These include repeat-offenders and people whose blood alcohol content exceeds 0.15 grams per deciliter of blood -- a much higher level of alcohol content than the legal limit of 0.08.
The basis for the Century Council's hard-core threshold comes from government tests of drivers involved in alcohol-related fatal crashes in 2007, showing three out of five had a BAC of at least 0.15...
On that one trip where a habitual drunken driver is stopped or killed, his blood-alcohol content might be below 0.15 even if it has often been higher. In a 2002 study co-authored by Susan Baker, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Health, researchers drew upon an intriguing data source: interviews with surviving family members of 818 victims of fatal crashes.
The next of kin painted a frightening portrait of those dead drivers with a BAC of 0.15 or higher: 55% were described as drinking and driving at least once a month. But those whose blood-alcohol level was between 0.10 and 0.14 -- and thus mostly wouldn't have qualified as hard-core -- weren't much safer: 35% drove drunk at least monthly. "We shouldn't simply be focusing on 'hard-core' drivers," Prof. Baker says.
Still, the Century Council is sticking to the 0.15 threshold. "We think the decision to drink enough to get to 0.15 or above is a dramatically dangerous decision," says Ralph Blackman, chief executive of the group.
Even blood-alcohol levels of 0.05 impair motor skills and heighten crash risk, and many countries draw the line there or at 0.02. MADD isn't pushing for a reduction. "We have no intention of going below 0.08," says Chuck Hurley, chief executive of the group. "We want 0.08 enforced." He says aggressive enforcement and penalties, particularly ignition interlock, would save more lives than an effort to lower the limit, which would "take us five years and we would accomplish nothing else."...
