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Rocky Mountain News (CO)
August 11, 2000
Section: Editorial
Edition: Final
Page Number: 57A
DRIVERS AGAINST MADD MOTHERS
Mike Rosen
If you like a little wine with your pork, keep your eye on the $55 billion 2001 federal transportation spending bill. In addition to all the tasty highway projects in this appropriation, there's a tough anti-alcohol provision that activist groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been long thirsting for. It would impose a national blood alcohol content (BAC) standard of 0.08 percent for determining drunk driving, punctuated with losses of federal highway funds for states that fail to comply. Currently, 18 states use 0.08 as the driving while intoxicated standard. The other 32 states, including Colorado, have a more lenient 0.10 standard. Drunk driving is a particularly emotional topic, so let me make my position clear. I support your legal right to drink and drive. I also support the apprehension and prosecution of drunk drivers. These positions aren't contradictory. They hinge on the definition of ``drunk.'' Driving home from church on Sunday after a sip of sacramental wine, you are combining drinking and driving, but you're not drunk. Driving home from a bar on Saturday night after 10 boilermakers in the last two hours, you're a drunk driver.
MADD activists have asked: ``Why should we tolerate any usage of alcohol and driving?'' Because two beers at a ball game don't make you a drunk driver, nor do a couple of glasses of wine with dinner at a restaurant. Moderate drinking is a sensory pleasure and a social lubricant. It's an integral part of our culture. When an ill-considered constitutional amendment attempted to prohibit it 80 years ago, the American public flaunted the law and kept drinking anyway. The vast majority of Americans mix moderate drinking and driving responsibly. They shouldn't be treated like those who don't. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a 120-pound woman who drinks two 6-ounce glasses of wine in two hours would show a 0.08 BAC level. That's unreasonably stringent as a DWI standard. Drivers with a BAC level of 0.08 are not dangerously impaired. Drivers over 0.10 are. If the line is to be drawn anywhere above zero, 0.10 is reasonable. An NHTSA study found that there is virtually no difference in fatality rates between drivers with a BAC of 0.08 and 0.02. Seriously drunk drivers, with BAC levels at or above 0.14 percent, are the cause of nearly two-thirds of all alcohol-related traffic deaths. That's where the real problem is. An analysis by University of New Mexico sociologist H. Lawrence Ross concludes that while a 0.08 standard will generate a 60 percent increase in DWI arrests, it will produce no significant decrease in fatalities. He advises that we target really drunk drivers rather than cast a ``net so wide and so tightly woven to sweep up huge numbers of people.'' If Congress adopts the 0.08 standard, do you imagine that MADD will fold up its tent and go away? This standard is just a stop along the way to 0.05 and beyond. As their own acronym implies, MADD's ranks include many angry, emotionally driven people bent on an anti-alcohol crusade. Candy Lightner founded MADD after her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunk driver. In her 1990 book she confided: ``Through MADD, I found a way to deal with my anger, a way to address a serious social problem that had taken my daughter from me and a way to fill my time for years to come. Cari's death had filled me with the worst pain I had ever imagined, and it turned my life around. Before her death I was a divorced mother raising three children and selling real estate. Within a few months after her death, I was a public personality and a crusader for a cause.'' For its members, MADD is as much a therapy group as a political lobby. We can sympathize with their personal losses, but that doesn't mean we must defer to their emotional agenda when it conflicts with reasonable public policy. Incidentally, Cindy Lightner is no longer with MADD; she says it's become ``overzealous.'' LIB2
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