[Andy Brice] Enforcement based on blood alcohol level seems a good compromise between fairness and enforceability. The downside is that some people with tolerable levels of impairment might have to walk, get lifts or take taxis. Hardly a major infringement of their civil liberties.
[hr]
[Hermit]
In order to challenge your preconceptions, perhaps it is time for some anecdotes.
Once upon a time, not terribly long ago, a bunch of Russian and South African military pilots spent a night in a mess, with the Russians determined to prove to the South Africans that Russians can drink South Africans under the table and the South Africans equally determined to prove their superiority. After all, military pilots are chosen to be competitive. The drinking session ended, with honors equal and nobody under the table, at about 03h30, leaving just about enough time to get coffee, a shower and flight prepped before a series of evaluation flights including camera dog-fighting in some (very expensive) prototype aircraft. Nobody involved in the exercise had a blood alcohol level under about three or four times the legal limit during the evaluation exercise - and despite oxygen use, no airframes were bent.
Then there was a "Don't Drink and Drive" campaign demonstration, which might be illuminating. A beer production company, national broadcaster, national automobile association, institute of advanced drivers and a well known car manufacturer set up a demonstration of the dangers of drunken driving. A racetrack was hired and rally drivers invited to a party. During the very alcoholic party, which began in the morning, the drivers took it in turns to have blood samples taken before taking a turn on the track to race against the clock. The first driver to leave the track or suffer some other mishap would terminate the carefully filmed event. As the day progressed and the supplies of beers and chasers were consumed, the scoreboard, which reflected alcohol levels and circuit times, told an ever more embarrassing story. Lap times were inversely proportional to alcohol levels. By early afternoon, the track record had fallen and was being challenged by each driver in turn. When blood alcohol levels reached the point w
here it was obvious that liver damage was likely to occur before a driver went off the track, the event - and its broadcast - were cancelled.
So do I recommend the above as prototypes*? Contrast this. Before breathalyzers came into common use, people were frequently arrested for DUI when they had blood alcohol levels lower than the current legal limits - yet they were undoubtedly not in control of themselves or their vehicles. Why is this? Simple. People react differently to alcohol at different times. Different people have very different reactions. Different drinks have very different effects on the same person**. Part is mental, part is physical. Two beers may be enough to put person a into a comatose state, while person b may be able to drink 30 and still function effectively. Person b on another occasion may have an unnoticed cold, be tired or depressed and be unable to drink more than 3 beers and retain good judgment. The real trouble this introduces is that tolerance is not easily predicted and the person involved is likely to be the least capable of judging their degree of impairment. In my opinion, the only safe approach is to decide ahead
of time what the parameters should be - and to stick to them. Some people are incapable of doing this. And so we need to regulate it - and do.
Judging competence is, unfortunately, largely subjective** and difficult to enforce. Instead there is a large sunk investment in readily available blood alcohol measurement systems - as blood alcohol levels are easy to determine and very difficult for an accused to counter. However, by now, you should recognize that blood alcohol levels are a totally ineffective way of determining impairment...
Society's response has been to set blood alcohol levels at a point where the average person will exceed them after drinking around two beers or glasses of wine. At this level, the average person can still drive reasonably safely (or at least only as badly as they usually do), but the level is set in a futile attempt to control the person who should probably not be drinking at all - and who, despite this low limit, may still be able to avoid a conviction for DUI due to low blood alcohol concentrations, despite being near paralytic.
The entire field is vastly complicated by the profitable business that this has turned out to be. Insurance companies make a fortune out of risk unrelated premiums charged to people who have been found guilty of DUI. Police receive huge budgets to prevent drinking and driving. DUI checkpoints allow officers to legitimately check people and vehicle contents that would otherwise be off-limits to them. So every traffic incident where a person has been near alcohol in the previous 24 hours is reported as alcohol related - whether the operator was competent or not. And the public is duly horrified and pays more money and yields more freedom, in the futile hope of being protected from this danger. Accident figures are shown to respond to holiday campaigns - and they do. Sane people won't take the risk of an arrest for DUI and its consequences and stay off the road after they have had a drink – and if really cautious, don't drink at all and attempt to avoid the roads, which are supposedly full of drunken drivers. A
s any actuary will tell you, fewer driver miles, fewer accidents. More to the point, fewer drinkers, fewer "alcohol related" accidents. But that is not how this is reported...
In my opinion, the true road-dangers are the people who lack the judgment to determine what is sensible and what is not - or the resolution to be sensible; as well as the addictive types who can neither tolerate alcohol, nor say no thank-you to a drink. But we are not protected from such people - and under the current systems, cannot be. Such people will drink and drive no matter how draconian the punishments involved, no matter how insane the risks. Meanwhile all of us exchange ancient freedoms for illusionary safety, and not incidentally, convert far too many (voteless) children into lifelong criminals for having a drink, rather than teaching them to deal with alcohol (and other drugs) responsibly. Perhaps the mindset, which accompanies such abysmal choices, is the heaviest social burden of all.
Regards
Hermit
* Bear in mind that military pilots are selected as much for critical judgment as for any other factor., and a wannabe racing driver with poor judgment is unlikely to ever get a license to join the grid. Average people don’t go through this selection process
** I'll down a bottle of single malt or a couple of bottles of red wine with little visible effect - but a couple of shots of Tequila will make me behave very strangely. I have no idea why, but know that it is sensible for me to avoid the latter unless deliberately seeking oblivion in very tolerant company.
*** Although there are systems which can measure competence and produce objective results, they are not widely known and certainly not accepted by the legal system as a measure of operator capability or its lack.
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25721>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:15 MDT