Disclaimer, I do not drink let alone drink and drive so this law will not affect me personally.
I am horrified when people are killed by drunk drivers and believe those people should be punished as severely as possible. I also believe that when caught driving impaired the penalty should be stiff; just because you were lucky enough to avoid an accident doesn’t make your behaviour any more acceptable.
I am also prepared to consider lowering the impairment law to .05.
Those of course are all emotional responsed to this problem. “Kill the bastards” is easy to say.
But with this law I am confused. I tried to find an answer to this question.
How many serious accidents are caused by people driving at .05 - .08? The best I could find was this graph, showing the relative risk of being at an accident at various levels of impairment. The severity of the accidents are not indicated.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … evels_.png
As can be seen the risk of being in an accident with a BAC of .21 is over 30%. In other words every third time you drive at this level you will be in some kind of accident and probably a severe one. Penalize the bastards!
It drops considerably at .12 but still at 8% it means that if you party once a month you will be in some kind of accident each year.
At .05 the risk is not much greater than if you don’t drink at all. A greater risk for sure but not much. I am assuming here that the accidents will be unlikely to be any more severe than those of the non-drinkers.
So this law seems to be targeting a group of people who pose little risk because we don’t know how to handle the people who do.
And like any prohibition type law, it won’t help against the people we most want to get. I person at .05 is sober enough to say, I better not risk it, so we get the safe driver off the road. The people blowing .08 or greater are not. They are still driving.
Emotionally, the law looks good. Logically it is severely flawed (And I am not even considering due process here)