One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900

Afterword

This book began by my urging readers to raise their blood alcohol levels to the point at which it would be illegal to drive and then imagine themselves doing so—even though most would be somewhere between “buzzed” and drunk. I then reminded them that as recently as forty years ago, it was possible to drink nearly twice as much as I suggested and still drive legally. Then I explored the myriad historical reasons for these phenomena. They include Americans’ love of drinking, their love of driving, the country’s lack of adequate public transportation, and the enduring backlash against the Prohibition experiment of the 1920s. Meanwhile, industry, interested in selling alcohol and cars, has publicly oppposed drunk driving, but never in a manner that would seriously threaten the sales of its products. Finally, a strong American streak of individualism and libertarianism has hampered more aggressive attempts to curb drinking and driving. The question ultimately raised in this book is: “Is this so bad?” At first glance, one may be tempted to answer no. After all, anti–drunk driving activists have had their day in the sun, leading to many legislative victories, such as lowering the acceptable blood alcohol content from 0.15% to 0.08% and raising the legal drinking age to 21. Almost everyone has heard the phrase “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” and many of them take it seriously. In an era of cell phones and hand-held computers, there are many other causes of distracted driving that compete for our attention. Scholars have also carefully shown how public health issues, such as drunk driving, can be oversimplified and misconstrued. Finally, Afterword Afterword 179 in the wake of the passage of Barack Obama’s health care legislation, charges of a “nanny state,” in which the government too aggressively monitors healthrelated behaviors, have achieved new gusto. At the end of the day, however, the history of drunk driving control suggests that the answer to the question should be yes. One can make a cogent argument that people who eat fatty foods, smoke, or drink constitute a public health problem because society eventually pays their medical bills. But such individuals only indirectly threaten the health of their fellow Americans by raising health care costs. People who choose to drive in an impaired state, whether buzzed or drunk, directly threaten others every single time they get behind the wheel. There is a reason that modern public health efforts began with the quarantining of people with contagious infectious diseases. Healthy people, Americans agreed, had the right to be protected from potentially harmful—and deadly—threats. The efforts of RID, MADD, SADD, NTHSA, the NIAAA, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and their thousands of volunteers and employees notwithstanding, the history of drunk driving control has thrown this idea on its head. Bullied by industry and certain members of the public, legislators and law enforcement officers have frequently paid as much attention to the rights of those who choose to drink and drive as to those who might be victimized by such behavior. As a result, prosecutions based on BACs and other laws have always given significant credence to a number of plausible but ultimately questionable counterarguments: heavy drinkers hold their liquor especially well, even when behind the wheel; people caught driving drunk generally have made a one-time mistake; Breathalyzers regularly generate inaccurate readings; and arresting officers often give misleading testimony. And, ever since the disease of alcoholism became popular in the 1940s, judges, juries, and the general public have at times characterized the perpetrators of drunk driving offenses themselves as victims. With all due respect to the difficulties that such individuals experience before and after making a catastrophic mistake, this notion is utterly absurd. “history will look aghast at our alcohol/driving record,” said Ralph Hudson, the Wisconsin surgeon who became sensitized to the issue of drunk driving when the earnest and polite teenaged son of his nurse was needlessly killed. “This national embarrassment and disgrace has not been just the accumulation of death and injury,” he wrote, “but, rather, the strange acceptance of death and injury as the way of life.”1 As more and more potential distractions for drivers emerge, we should be 180 One for the Road less—not more—tolerant of a mindset that excuses such behaviors because “everybody does them.” The United States may never be like countries in which a...