With July 4th right around the corner, Americans are preparing for backyard barbecues and firework fiestas. But, while drunk driving has been on the decline for decades, America’s birthday still brings a heightened risk of drunk driving—and alcohol-related traffic accidents.
This often spurs policymakers to support poorly targeted or ineffective tactics in an attempt to keep drunk drivers off the roads—such as lowering the legal limit to 0.05 BAC or increasing the use of sobriety checkpoints.
While headlines often hail these efforts as “cracking down on drunk driving,” in reality such policies target moderate and responsible social drinkers, and fail to adequately address drunk driving. Roughly 70 percent of alcohol-related fatalities are caused by drunk drivers with extreme blood alcohol content levels—0.15 BAC and above. Many of them are repeat offenders with multiple DUIs on their record. So the bulk of America’s “drunk driving epidemic”—in the words of some activists—can be traced to a specific subset of problem drinkers.
It means tackling drunk driving is impossible without targeting the worst offenders.
Yet groups like the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and American Medical Association (AMA) are proposing anything but. Both have fought to lower the legal limit from 0.08 to 0.05 BAC—even though fewer than 1 percent of all alcohol-related fatalities occur between 0.05 and 0.07 BAC. “[R]educing BAC limit to 0.05 is one of many steps to end substance impairment in transportation,” the NTSB recently tweeted. The American Medical Association has supported that measure for decades: A 1986 AMA study recommended “adoption by all states of 0.05 percent BAC as per se evidence of alcohol-impaired driving.” They are joined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO), among others.
