Now I would be one of the first to say that drinking and driving is wrong…but how accurate is the breathalyser test on a person’s ability to drive? The effects of alcohol, just like most drugs, are subject to the quantity and frequency of use. A hardened alcoholic with 20 years of use is far less likely to be influenced by 2 beers than a teenager who has only just started to drink, so would the effect of drinking alcohol on driving ability be the same for both parties? The police breathalyser would not distinguish between the two since it measures the level of alcohol in the system rather than the tolerance of it. Do you think it is right for the police to set these limits which apply across the board to be regardless of the differences between the offenders?
I think that anyone who consumes even one drink and then drives should be arrested. The road is no place for anyone under the influence. Drinking impairs your judgment. It's not fair to the other sober drivers.
Driving while you are tired deterioates your driving ability. Driving while using your mobile phone affects your driving ability. Driving after having an argument with someone dear to your will affect your driving ability. Driving while considering an importnat business decision will affect your concentration. Where do you draw the line? only when it can be measured?
If you breathalised the cops in my area half would be over the limit, that is if you ever see one, they are terribly shy beasties, and take houres or even days of coaxing out of their hide outs.
Drunk driving and accidents can't be compared or calculated nearly as easily as most people think. For example, there are millions of drivers who regularly drive while drunk, and never have accidents at all ....yet they aren't used in the calculations about drunk driving. See? To make the claim that drinking causes accidents is faulty ...if for no other reason than that millions of drivers do it and never have any accidents. The only reliable way of making that statement is to compare the accident rates of all drivers who drink with drivers who don't drink. There are many more accidents involving sober drivers than there are involving drunk drivers. Baron Max
That is a good point. How can you comment on the percentage of drink drivers having accidents when you don't know how many there are out there to begin with?
If you're in any major city in the USA, or most any westernworld city, at night, and driving around, I'd say that better than half of those drivers have been drinking! And yet, see, we don't know it, do we? Nope ....and yet people make claims that driving while drinking is dangerous, etc. What about all those drunks who made it home without mishap that night? See? They don't count in the figures, do they? Baron Max
I don't know ....how 'bout the comparison? And what are you comparing? But how do you calculate it if you don't know about all the drunks who did NOT have fatal accidents? How many of them are there? If you don't know the answer to that one question, then everything is just an assumption. Baron Max
baron; another thing to remember is that a lot more people drive sober than drunk. thats just like saying that left handed people crash 1/10 as often as right handed people - by a percentage it is probably about the same. i do agree however that our statistics are useless until we have a confirmed number of drunk drivers. i know ive driven drunk numerous times without crashing.
if you are caught drink driving, then you should have your licence taken from you and destroyed and fined a big fine, and in the most extreem casses you should go to prison, it is a total myth and bullshit that some people can drive better drunk than sober. ------------------------ The 16,885 fatalities in alcohol-related crashes during 2005 represent an average of one alcohol-related fatality every 31 minutes. --------------------------------------- http://www.duihope.org/pictures_drunk_driving_crash2.html
I don't think anyone said that, did they? Okay, give me the non-alcohol-related crash stats in exactly the same format so we can actually make a comparison between the two. Otherwise, all you're doing is giving us the ol' shock treatment. Baron Max
There may be more sober crashes adn fatalities because (as mentioned) there are more sober drivers, but also, drunk drivers usually come out at night when there is less traffic. My husband was in a drunk driving accident. He spent a year in the hospital in a body cast and learning to walk again. His party buddy, the driver of the car, had a broken finger. I don't know why that pisses my husband off.
