WASHINGTON (AP) — A prestigious scientific panel is recommending that states significantly lower their drunken driving thresholds as part of a blueprint to eliminate the “entirely preventable” 10,000 alcohol-impaired driving deaths in the United States each year.
The U.S. government-commissioned, 489-page report by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released Wednesday throws the weight of the scientific body behind lowering the blood-alcohol concentration threshold from 0.08 to 0.05. All states have 0.08 thresholds. A Utah law passed last year that lowers the state’s threshold to 0.05 doesn’t go into effect until Dec. 30.
Read more: Utah House passes bill lowering legal blood alcohol limit to 0.05
The amount of alcohol required to reach 0.05 would depend on several factors, including the person’s size and whether the person has recently eaten. A 150-pound man might be over the 0.05 limit after two beers, while a 120-pound woman could exceed it after a single drink, according to the American Beverage Institute, a national restaurant group.
The panel also recommended that states significantly increase alcohol taxes and make alcohol less conveniently available, including reducing the hours and days alcohol is sold in stores, bars and restaurants. Research suggests a doubling of alcohol taxes could lead to an 11 percent reduction in traffic crash deaths, the report said.
It also calls for cracking down on sales to people under 21 or who are already intoxicated to discourage binge drinking, and putting limits on alcohol marketing while funding anti-alcohol campaigns similar to those against smoking.
All the proposals are likely to draw fierce opposition from the alcohol and restaurant industries. The beverage institute took out full-page newspaper ads opposing Utah’s new law that featured a fake mugshot under a large headline reading, “Utah: Come for vacation, leave on probation.”
The recommendations in the academies’ report would “do nothing to deter” repeat offenders and high BAC drivers, who represent the “vast majority” of alcohol-impaired driving deaths, the Distilled Spirits Council said in a statement. The council said it also doesn’t support the report’s recommendations for “tax increases and advertising bans, which will have little or no impact on traffic safety.”
The report points out that “alcohol-impaired driving remains the deadliest and costliest danger on U.S. roads,” accounting for 28 percent of traffic deaths. Each day, 29 people in the U.S. die in alcohol-related crashes and many more are injured. Forty percent of those killed are people other than the drunken driver.
Rural areas are disproportionately affected. In 2015, 48 percent of drunken driving fatalities occurred in rural areas.
The report says many strategies have been effective to prevent drunken driving, but “a coordinated multilevel approach across multiple sectors will be required to accelerate change.”
“The problem isn’t intractable,” the report said.
From the early 1980s to the early 2000s, there was significant progress as the result of an increase in the drinking age to 21, decreases in the blood-alcohol threshold, and other measures, the report said. But since then, progress has stagnated and recently has begun to reverse.
Action to address drunken driving can’t wait for the advent of self-driving cars immune to the lures of a cold beer or a fine wine — it will take too long for autonomous vehicles to replace all the human-driven machines on the road, said the panel’s chairman, Steven Teutsch, a senior fellow for health policy and economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
“In the meantime, we have 10,000 people a year dying and we ought to do something about it,” he said.
The report cites studies that show the United States lags behind other high-income countries in preventing drunken driving fatalities. More than 100 countries have adopted the 0.05 threshold lower. In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped, the National Transportation Safety Board said in 2013. The safety board has also recommended the 0.05 threshold.
Alcoholic beverages have changed significantly over the past 25 years. “They are more affordable, of far greater variety, and more widely advertised and promoted than in earlier periods,” the report said. The lack of consistency in serving sizes and the combination of alcohol with caffeine and energy drinks make it harder for drinkers to estimate their level of impairment.
The report was commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which asked the academies to determine which strategies for reducing drunken driving have been proven effective.
Written by JOAN LOWY, Associated Press
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @STGnews
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Who are we to question the science? There are plenty of rock solid data points to show that lowering the threshold will reduce the incidence of DUI. We have demonstrated causation, beyond mere correlation. The most conscientious among us will take a taxi/Uber/Lyft ride home, instead of driving ourselves in an impaired manner.
There is bound to be a good portion of those drivers who currently ignore the law, feel no impact as a result of a lower threshold. Only proactive enforcement is going to catch these guys, before they hurt themselves, or others. Increasing the utilization of ignition interlocks, for repeat offenders, is a fair burden to put on the shoulders of this subset of the population.
As a reminder, Colorado does have an existing law that determines impaired driving starts at a BAC of 0.05%, with modest penalties, compared to the more significant DUI threshold of 0.08%. Utah will hopefully spend time looking at Colorado’s implementation…….
I still refuse to buy liquor in Utah to contribute any funds to the state. I do believe in driving responsibly or stay home and drink. Mesquite prices are very attractive. Don’t even comment about breaking the law by bring it across state lines, the parking lots there are full of Utah license plates. I think law enforcement has more important things to do.
OK, first off, you can find a group of individuals, (call them a panel if you will) who will say anything you want to hear. Study? Sure, lots of different studies, all worded in such a way to get the answer you are looking for at a particular time.
Now I really don’t give a right rip about DUI laws, because I never drink, (even a glass of wine with dinner,) and then drive.
But what I am absolutely convinced of is that this law is not going to stop the buzzed or flat out drunk drivers on the road. There is only one thing that will do that, and that is strict enforcement of existing laws.
The vast majority of laws are only proposed to get the politicians name in front of the public. They actually don’t care whether they do any good, or a lot of harm.