The Nation; A Spirited Debate Over DUI Laws; The government’s effort to compel states to lower blood-alcohol limits encounters resistance. A senator in Iowa calls the policy ‘blackmail.
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“I thought the emphasis on .08 laws was not where the emphasis should have been placed,” she said. “The majority of crashes occur with high blood-alcohol levels, the .15, .18 and .25 drinkers. Lowering the blood-alcohol concentration was not a solution to the alcohol problem.” In 2001, the system reported that alcohol-involved crashes took the lives of 17,448 people. That includes cases where there was direct evidence of alcohol and others where no evidence of alcohol was reported. Those cases are statistically estimated by a complex mathematical model that uses variables such as driver age, time of crash and gender. For example, if a young man hits a tree early in the morning, the model would classify the crash as alcohol-related, even without any evidence of alcohol. Joseph Carra, director of the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, the NHTSA office that compiles the data, contends that all 17,448 alcohol-related highway deaths in 2001 would have been prevented if alcohol was removed from every driver. Source : pqasb.pqarchiver.com |