You have all seen the media campaign on TV by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation: A guy is driving home at night, drowning in what looks like a big car full of fruit punch. As the driver rolls the window down, the officer is met with glossy eyes and a flood at his feet of what is supposed to be some sort of alcoholic beverage. The point? No one can get away with drunken driving in Wisconsin, an idea reflected in the ominous warning at the end: “Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest.” The problem? Wisconsinites know the TV spot is simply for show. Wisconsin is one of a select few states that has an essentially decriminalized first offense for inebriated driving. On top of that, legislation is currently being pushed through the state Senate that would keep in place such lenient punishment for first-time offenders.
Seems awful, right? The individual who drinks his weight in beer and then takes a nighttime cruise on the streets of Madison receives a lesser fine than the intrigued freshman who uses his brother’s license to get into Madhatter. We need to not only say how much we disdain drunken driving but prove it by enacting stricter punishments that will keep drunks off the road.
Some, however, see things differently. I refer to a piece in this Editorial section last week by Patrick McEwen, “To make roadways safer, legalize drunk driving.” McEwen argues that all driving laws should be enforced in light of their consequences, not actions. In other words, the drunken driver who makes it home safe is less a criminal than the chronic texter who causes an accident while sending a text message from behind the wheel. While this makes some intuitive sense, it ignores some disturbing realities. This approach would always put more blame on the individual who accidentally commits a crime than on someone who tried to commit a crime, yet failed. The implications of this are obvious and outrageous.
Something I witnessed this past weekend serves as a good example. As I was trying to cross University Avenue, a clearly intoxicated driver was swerving out of his lane while driving the wrong way down the obviously one-way street. His actions, fortunately, hurt no one, yet he was immediately pulled over by city police. Should this man be punished by more than a simple fine? Yes. And the reason why exemplifies why we need harsher drunken driving laws in this state: They have a demonstrable deterrent effect.
Although many people question the deterrence effectiveness of drunken driving laws, they clearly make the roads safer, as McEwen himself points out. I come from a state that has much harsher penalties for first time DUI offenders, including up to a $5,000 fine and two-and-a-half years in jail, and the percentage of automobile-related fatalities that involved alcohol is the exact national average, 32 percent. The state of Wisconsin, with its much more lenient punishment, hits the scales at a whopping 42 percent. Obviously the difference cannot all be attributed to drunken driving laws, but they are eye-opening.
This deterrent factor has a real significance. The Center for Disease Control and the Task Force on Community Preventive Services recently conducted a study on the national conversion to a universal standard of 0.08 percent BAC as the legal point at which a driver is drunk. The study showed that states in which the BAC limit was lowered from 0.10 percent to 0.08 percent experienced a 7 percent reduction in alcohol-related fatalities, a figure that represents 500 lives saved annually. The psychological effects of drunken driving legislation are real.
Perhaps the intoxicated driver of the wayward vehicle I saw on University had never received a OWI before and knew the limited potential for punishment if he was caught. So, he went joyriding this one time. Or, perhaps, he has done it many times before, testing his luck until his essential “free pass” was used up. Clearly, there’s a problem in this system. The answer, however, is not eliminating drunken driving legislation but increasing its currently limited severity.
McEwen’s piece attempts to make the point that people should be responsible for their driving, no matter what type of distraction they are involved in. In making this claim, he says that drinkers should be able to recognize themselves when they have had too much. He claims, in fact, that drunken drivers should simply police themselves, they “could account for their lower reaction times by slowing down or even flashing their warning lights as a ‘Hey, I’m drunk — watch out’ signal to others.” This idea shows a blatant misunderstanding of the effects of alcohol. Not only does intoxication slow your reaction time, it clearly affects your decision-making process, giving what many college students refer to as “liquid courage.” Saying that drunken drivers try to come “as close to ‘normal’ driving as they can” — in other words, they try to drive the speed limit — is very much an unqualified assumption and one that is not reflected in reality.
The surest way of limiting drunken driving, and thus saving lives, is to increase legislation and strictly enforce it. It is inappropriate to assume that drunken drivers will have the community’s interest in mind when they hit the road. By increasing the deterrence element of drunken driving legislation, we can remove this consideration as a factor and force more people to think that if they drink and drive, the consequences will be drastic and damaging.
Ben White ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science.
