What is drunk driving? |

Drunk Driving Laws

Every US state has enacted a law making it illegal to drive with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 percent or higher. Also, each US state has set the minimum drinking age to twenty-one years and has established a zero-tolerance law that prohibits people less than twenty-one years of age from driving after drinking. The majority of zero-tolerance laws set the drinking limit to a BAC of 0.02 percent. Drivers convicted of alcohol-impaired driving face suspension or revocation of their license.

Drivers who refuse to undergo BAC testing or who fail the test can have their
license taken away immediately under a process called administrative license
suspension, and the length of time a license is suspended ranges from seven days
to one year, depending on the state. Many states will consider restoring limited
driving privileges during a suspension if the person demonstrates a special
hardship (such as needing to drive to work).

A mechanism that prevents suspended or probationary drivers from operating a vehicle while impaired by alcohol is the ignition interlock device. This device is attached to the vehicle’s ignition and forces the driver, before being able to start the vehicle, to blow into the device for an analysis of the driver’s blood alcohol level; a device that registers a BAC of 0.08 or above will lock the vehicle’s ignition.

Effects of Alcohol

Alcohol is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and travels throughout the body and to the brain within thirty to seventy minutes of having an alcoholic drink. A standard alcoholic beverage (such as a twelve-ounce beer, a five-ounce glass of wine, or one shot of liquor) contains about one-half ounce (exactly 0.54 ounces) of alcohol.

All of these types of alcohol will affect BAC in the same way. How quickly a
person’s BAC rises will depend on how quickly he or she drinks the beverage, the
amount he or she drinks, the amount of food in the person’s stomach, and his or
her weight and gender. Having food in the stomach helps slow the absorption of
alcohol through the stomach walls into the bloodstream. Moreover, heavier people
have more water in their body, and this water dilutes their BAC. Women typically
have less water and more body fat than men, and alcohol is not easily absorbed
into fat cells, so more alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream.

The effects brought on by alcohol start to appear with a BAC of 0.02 percent. These effects include a loss of judgment and a decline in the driver’s ability to quickly track moving objects or perform two tasks at a time. Once a person’s BAC reaches 0.05, the risk of a fatal crash substantially increases. At this level, the person is less alert and coordinated, has trouble focusing, has trouble steering the vehicle, and is slower to respond to emergency driving situations. At a BAC of 0.08 percent, muscle coordination is poor and the driver will have problems concentrating and controlling the vehicle, will have short-term memory loss, will have problems processing information (for example, signal detection), and will show impaired reasoning and depth perception. With a BAC of 0.10 the driver’s reaction time and control deteriorates, thinking slows further, and driving becomes even more difficult. By the time a driver’s BAC reaches 0.15 percent, he or she shows a major loss of balance, impaired processing of information, inattention, and little control of the vehicle.

Statistics

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) tracks statistics on alcohol-impaired driving and reports these results annually. The NCSA states that any fatal crash in which a driver has a BAC of 0.08 percent or higher is an alcohol-impaired-driving crash, and fatalities resulting from this crash are alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities. They further clarify that alcohol-impaired does not mean that the crash or the fatality was solely caused by alcohol impairment.

Another source that monitors and reports statistics annually is the Insurance
Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). This organization uses data from the US
Department of Transportation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System to analyze and
report statistics.

Fatalities

Some progress has been made to reduce alcohol-impaired driving and related
injuries and deaths since about 1980. Reports from the NCSA and the IIHS show that
from 1982 to 1994, the United States had a 32 percent decline in deaths among
drivers with a BAC at or above 0.08. This decline has leveled off in fatalities
per year, and alcohol-related traffic fatalities declined by 23 percent between
2004 and 2013. Between the early 1980s and early 2010s, alcohol-related traffic
deaths per population have declined by 50 percent, with the greatest proportional
declines among individuals between the ages of sixteen and twenty. In the
mid-1970s, alcohol was a factor in nearly two-thirds of all traffic fatalities; by
2013, alcohol was involved in roughly one-third of all traffic deaths. From 2012
to 2013, deaths in alcohol-related traffic accidents declined by 2.5 percent.

There were 10,076 alcohol-impaired traffic fatalities in the United States in 2013
(or one death every fifty-one minutes), accounting for 31 percent of the total
motor vehicle traffic fatalities nationwide. Drunk drivers made up 65 percent of
persons killed; 16 percent were passengers in the drunk drivers’ vehicles, 11
percent were occupants in other vehicles, and 8 percent were not in a motor
vehicle.

Time of day and day of the week also were important indicators of an increased
incidence of alcohol-related-deaths. Midnight to 3 a.m. was the deadliest time for
intoxicated drivers involved in crashes: 66 percent of all traffic fatalities at
this time occurred in alcohol-related crashes and 55 percent of drivers involved
in fatal crashes between midnight and 3 a.m. were alcohol-impaired. The incidence
of alcohol-impaired drivers involved in fatal crashes was nearly four times higher
at night (35 percent) than at daytime (9 percent) and was two times higher on
weekends (30 percent) than on weekdays (15 percent).

The NCSA defined nighttime as starting at 6 p.m. and ending at 5:59 a.m. (daytime
began at 6 a.m. and ended at 5:59 p.m.) and defined weekend as starting Friday at
6 p.m. and as ending Monday at 5:59 a.m. (Weekday was defined as Monday from 5
a.m. to Friday at 5:59 p.m.). The IIHS narrowed the timeframe for what defined
nighttime (9 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and found that 59 percent of drivers with a BAC at or
above 0.08 had died during that time, compared with 19 percent during other hours
of the day.

Of 1,149 children age fourteen years and younger who were killed in motor vehicle
crashes, two hundred (or 17 percent) died in crashes involving alcohol-impaired
drivers. Of those two hundred children, 61 percent were in the vehicle of the
alcohol-impaired driver and 15 percent were pedestrians or cyclists who were
struck by the alcohol-impaired driver’s vehicle (data not reported on the
remaining 34 percent).

Driver Characteristics

Of the 11,307 drivers involved in a fatal crash with a recorded BAC of 0.01
percent or higher in 2013, 84 percent had a BAC of at least 0.08 and 56 percent
had a BAC of 0.15 or higher. Of the 10,076 alcohol-related traffic fatalities in
2013, 68 percent occurred in crashes in which at least one drive had a BAC of 0.15
or higher. The most common BAC recorded for drunk drivers involved in fatal
crashes was 0.17 percent.

Age was a significant predictor of a person driving drunk and being involved in a
fatal crash. In 2013, drivers between twenty-one and twenty-four years of age with
a BAC of 0.08 or higher topped the list of drivers involved in fatal crashes at 33
percent, followed by drivers aged twenty-five to thirty-four years (29 percent),
thirty-five to forty-four years (24 percent), forty-five to fifty-four years (20
percent), sixteen to twenty years (17 percent), fifty-five to sixty-four years (14
percent), sixty-five to seventy-four years (8 percent), and seventy-five years or
older (5 percent). There was a consistently higher percentage of male drivers with
a BAC at or above 0.08 percent who were involved in fatal crashes in every age
group. More than one-half of men age twenty-one to thirty years (58 percent) and
age thirty-one to forty years (53 percent) with a BAC at or above 0.08 and
involved in a crash were killed.

The proportion of drivers involved in fatal crashes with BACs of 0.08 or higher
was 23 percent among male drivers and 15 percent among female drivers, 27 percent
were motorcyclists, 23 percent were drivers of passenger vehicles, 21 percent were
drivers of light trucks, and 2 percent were drivers of large trucks. Drivers
involved in a fatal crash with a reported BAC level of 0.08 or higher were eight
times more likely than nondrinking drivers to have a previous impaired-driving
conviction. Among driver fatalities for which seatbelt use was reported, 68
percent were not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash.

Bibliography

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NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporing Tools. US Dept.
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Dasgupta, Amitava.
The Science of Drinking: How Alcohol Affects Your Body and
Mind. Lanham: Rowman, 2011. Print.

"Drunk Driving Laws." Governors
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