One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900

CHAPTER 5 Lawyers, Libertarians, and the Liquor Lobby Fight Back

Perhaps the state of the drunk driving movement in the early 1990s was best exemplified by a book published by then MADD president Micky Sadoff in 1991. Get MADD Again, America! reminded readers that while much had been accomplished in the 1980s, mortality rates were still extremely high. The initial decline in annual deaths from 25,000 to 17,000 had occurred between 1980 and 1985, but by 1991, the decrease had leveled off. Sadoff’s book raised a key issue: How does one assess the achievements of a social movement like drunk driving control? Was the consistent 17,000 figure a sign of success or a reminder that not enough had been done?1 What had become clear by the early 1990s was that the anti–drunk driving arguments made by MADD and other groups, which had once seemed incontestable , could be challenged. Part of the negativity was again directed at MADD, which, despite championing an ostensibly unobjectionable cause, continued to be rebuked for both its administrative and its policy decisions. Meanwhile , critics, ranging from industry representatives to academics to defense lawyers, questioned the actual harm caused by drinking drivers and the statistics that activists used. An additional attack, promoted by the expanding use of the Internet, was that MADD and related activist groups were neoprohibitionist, against not only drunk driving but also drinking. This is not to say that the movement was failing. In addition to the annual saving of thousands of lives, many other major strides had been made. By 2004, for example, all fifty states had set legal BACs at 0.08%, almost half the level originally established in the 1930s and more in line with Europe. Extensive data chapter five Lawyers, Libertarians, and the Liquor Lobby Fight Back 124 One for the Road now existed proving that certain interventions—such as the age-21 drinking law, sobriety checkpoints, and administrative license revocation—truly lowered rates of drunk driving and mortality. But as Sadoff must have feared, the backlash had taken its toll. By the start of the twenty-first century, the annual number of arrests for drunk driving had declined by 30 percent, and much of the momentum that had emerged from C. Everett Koop’s workshop had been lost. As of the early 1990s, the anti–drunk driving crusade had become truly broadbased , including the National Commission Against Drunk Driving (NCADD), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and other government agencies, the Distilled Spirits Council (DISCUS) and other industry groups, and the citizen-activists of RID, MADD, and SADD. But because of its name-recognition and multimillion-dollar budget, MADD had become synonymous with efforts to control DWI. So when it called for a reinvigoration of the movement, people paid attention. “Americans are still dying in horrifying numbers at the hands of drunk or drugged drivers,” Sadoff told her readers. Get MADD Again, America! was a typical mix of anger, policy recommendations, and tragic stories. One such story was that of a 17-year-old male driver with a 16-year-old female passenger who were both killed in 1990, when they hit a pickup truck. The boy’s BAC was 0.23% and the girl’s was 0.16%. The storyteller was Donna McCary, who was driving the truck that the boy hit. She survived , although she required multiple operations for fractured bones and suffered permanent damage to her right eye. McCary, who subsequently became a MADD volunteer, expressed regret that the boy’s family had never contacted her, stating: “I was innocent and yet neither my life nor my family’s will ever be the same because this driver made the choice to drink and drive.”2 The first half of Sadoff’s book advocated “closing the loopholes”—expanding the use of existing measures to counter drunk driving, including administrative license revocation, sobriety checkpoints, and BAC testing in the field. MADD was also pushing to lower the nationwide BAC from 0.10% to 0.08%. But part two of the book—specifically, a discussion of underage drinking—represented a change in focus. MADD had long been concerned with the significant role played by teenagers and young adults in drunk driving crashes; its support of raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 had reflected this concern. But even though an estimated 6,660 lives had been saved by this new legislation, Sadoff wrote, “young drivers in America today continue to be disproportionately involved in traffic crashes, injuries and deaths involving alcohol...