The Negative Outcomes Of Drunk Driving

This paper explores the bad outcomes that can come from drunk driving. Drunk driving is one of the major causes of death in the America. Stronger penalties for DUI should be enacted to cause a shift in cultural norms to deter citizens from driving intoxicated. Drinking and driving considered driving under the influence (DUI). Since the 1980s the number of alcohol related deaths has been steadily reducing due to effective public awareness and law enforcement campaigns. However drunk driving remains a serious problem. In the United States twenty eight people die from an accident involving an intoxicated driver every day. Alcohol is a substance that reduces the function of the brain, impairing thinking, reasoning, and muscle coordination (NHTSA) All of these are essential to operate a vehicle safely. Any amount of alcohol in your bloodstream can have an affect on your driving ability.

Your attention span is reduced heavily with drinking which significantly increases the chance of an accident. Heavy drinking affects motor skills such as eye, hand, and feet coordination. Too much alcohol could even make it difficult to get in your car and find its ignition. Drivers between the ages 21 to 45 are most likely to be involved in alcohol related accidents. Only a small fraction of drivers had drinking and driving convictions in the previous three years. Impaired driving claims more than 10,000 lives a year. These deaths and damages contribute to a cost of $44 billion (2019 Gale, a Cengage Company). The legal limit of alcohol concentration is 0.8 grams of alcohol per deciliter of blood. The states have recently lowered the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) for drivers. The amount of alcohol to blood in your body is known as blood alcohol concentration (BAC). Sobriety checkpoints are typically conducted at high visibility locations that attract a great deal of vehicular traffic. Forty two states impose a mandatory license suspension for a first alcohol related offense while driving. Additionally a $500 fine is issued and the driver will go to jail for 7 to 60 days.

Organisations and campaigns were made for prevention against drunk driving. The term vehicular homicide is used in the case where a drunk driver takes the life of another person. A drunk driver on average will drive 80 times while intoxicated before their first arrest. Drunk driving is an epidemic. Traffic accidents are the most common cause of death for teens. A third of those total deaths involve alcohol or other substance. Additionally, teenagers that got involved with alcohol at a young age are seven times more probable to become involved in a crash involving alcohol. Between 50 and 75 percent of people continue driving illegally after they’ve had their license revoked due to drunk driving. This imposes the need for ignition interlock devices to be installed in a vehicle after even the first offense.

When alcohol is in your system it affects how quick you are able to react to different situations and slows your response time which increases the chance of an accident.while driving there are many things that require your undivided concentration such as staying in your lane, speed, and other vehicles on the road. In most states an ignition interlock device is needed for a conviction. An ignition interlock device is much like a breathalyzer. This device analyzes a driver's breath and disable the engine if alcohol is detected. Alcohol exclusion laws allow insurance companies to deny payment for treatment of drunk drivers' injuries, but they have limited doctors' abilities to diagnose alcohol problems and recommend treatment. All 50 states have taken serious action in the situation of individuals that DUI. 85 percent of drinking and driving episodes were reported by binge drinkers. 4 in 5 of the people who drink and drive are men.

The midwest region has had the highest annual rate of drunk driving episodes at 643 per 1,000 population, which was significantly higher than the rates in all other regions, not including 12 states and DC with small sample sizes and possibly unstable rates, four of the seven states with rates of alcohol-impaired driving that were much higher than the U.S. rate overall were in the Midwest. The Midwest also had the highest prevalence of binge drinking at 16.5%, which was much higher than the prevalence in the Northeast. (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; 2010.)

Recently, the United States has fell behind in movement than most other high-income countries in reducing the rate of motor vehicle crash deaths. Because alcohol-related driving crashes make up for about one third of all crash fatalities, any successful way of reducing overall crash deaths must address alcohol-impaired driving. To reduce drunk driving, states and communities impose the use of sobriety checkpoints, strictly enforcing 0.08 BAC laws and minimum legal drinking age laws, and requiring ignition interlocks for all people convicted of alcohol-impaired driving, whether it is their first offense or a subsequent offense. To reduce the excessive drinking involved with alcohol-impaired driving, states and communities also increase alcohol taxes, regulate alcohol outlet density, and enact dram shop liability laws. (cdc.gov). One study in California found that when the State changed from a secondary to a primary law, the greatest percentage increases safety belt use. nearly 40 percent of those were among motorists who were driving after drinking (Lange and Voas 1998). This indicates primary enforcement safety belt laws can contribute and be effective in reducing motor vehicle deaths involving impaired drivers.

Evidence about the relationship between age of drinking and alcohol–related crash involvement is given from the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES) Further analyses of that survey showed that even after controlling for history of alcohol dependence, those who started drinking at younger ages were more probable to drink heavily with greater frequency (Hingson et al. 2000). As a further matter, the younger people were when they began drinking, the greater their probability of driving after drinking too much and of being in motor vehicle crashes because of drinking. Compared with people who waited until 21 years of age or older to start drinking, those who began drinking before age 14 were three times more likely to report driving after drinking excessively and four times more likely to report doing so in the year before the survey. Those who started drinking before age 14 were seven times more likely to be in a alcohol–related vehicle crash at any time in their lives and in the past year.

A study finds that even ' buzzed' drivers with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.01 percent are 46 percent more probable to be officially blamed by accident investigators than are the sober drivers they crash with. (ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 January 2014) The Open Container Laws addressing drinking and driving required that the drivers would be fined if open containers of alcoholic drinks discovered in their vehicles. As a result of this being an interstate law instead of a federal law, the states had the right to decide if they issued the law. They could also adjust the contents of this law. In 1988, Congress addressed that states that failed to impose the Open Container Laws would lose some of their federal highway construction funding. As of recent times, only 43 states have imposed this law. Eisenberg and Benson showed that this law had a negative relationship with alcohol-related fatalities.

Factors such as income, unemployment rates, young driver ratio, and population density are significant in areas with low rates of alcohol-involved fatalities; while only income and population density were significant in areas with high rates of alcohol-related deaths. Considering the amount of coefficients, it is also found that lower beer tax and declined economic conditions are involved with higher rate of alcohol-related deaths with impact greater in areas with low alcohol-involved fatalities than in high alcohol fatality areas. Additionally, a higher number of young drivers in areas with low rates of alcohol-related deaths result in increased fatalities, where as they did not greatly affect the deaths in the areas with higher rates of alcohol-related deaths. This implies that in areas with low alcohol-related deaths, drinking habits and attitudes may be reduced more easily by stricter drinking and driving policies. (Accid Anal Prev. 2012 )