Drunk driving accounts for a whopping one third of all U.S. traffic fatalities, or about 12,000 Americans killed in the past year. But drunk driving isn’t the same throughout America. Some cities have worse problems than others with alcohol, as surveyed by Men’s Health magazine. It found Fresno, CA as the “most drunk city in America.”

The magazine’s survey included a city’s alcohol-related car crashes, its number of drunk driving arrests and the severity of its drunk driving penalties. It also based conclusions on death rates from alcoholic liver disease and the frequency of binge drinking.

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Americans love their holiday traditions, including New Year’s Eve. In Japan, the new year isn’t widely acknowledged until people rise the next morning. But in the USA, millions of revelers party past midnight to ring in another year. The only trouble is, such partying often includes heavy drinking and unleashes drunk drivers on our roads.

It’s always the same story, so you’d think Americans would wake up and learn a vital lesson: Don’t drink and drive. Yet such deaths spike during year-end holidays, and thousands of Americans (nearly 14,000 in 2008) become yearly statistics in drunk driving fatalities.

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As we brace for the drunk driving tragedies which inevitably accompany year-end revelries, we applaud Montgomery County officials for a new tactic in the war against drunk drivers. County District Attorney Brett Ligon will start posting tweets on his Twitter account for the world to see whenever a person is arrested for drunk driving, DUI or DWI in that county.

As Chief Prosecutor Warren Diepraam told KPRC News, “We’ve kind of simplified it by using Twitter, putting that information that’s already out there as a public record . . . on Twitter so that people could follow who’s been arrested.”

The idea is to discourage persons from drunk driving via the threat of public humiliation — on top of arrest and possible prosecution. Ligon believes such a tactic could “embarrass the right offender” with the threat of “collateral damages” (public shame) beyond the legal case itself.

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Drunk drivers’ undeclared war on America has raged for decades, killing more than half a million U.S. citizens since 1982. Such a terrible toll mandates strong counterattacks, and one is requiring ignition-interlock devices in the vehicles of those who are known to be drunk drivers.

According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), most states have laws requiring such devices, which involve detecting alcohol via a driver’s breath and not allowing a car to start if the test fails.

In Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana and eight other states, the devices are required after an .08 reading for a DUI conviction. In Florida, North Carolina and six other states, they’re required after a .15 reading for a DUI conviction. In Texas, Missouri and four other states, they’re required after a repeat DUI conviction.

In California, it’s up to a judge’s discretion, but the state’s lawmakers just passed a bill which would launch a four-county pilot program for using such devices, including Los Angeles County.

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Time magazine reports that a cultural shift toward bemused tolerance of moms’ drinking so they can cope with busy days is circling the drain along with discarded martinis. Indeed, as advanced by books and commercials, the thought of a happily drinking mom has become less liberating than sobering — especially since a big-news tragedy this summer.

That tragedy, of course, was the horrific drunk driving accident near Hawthorne, N.Y. which claimed eight lives, including that of Diane Schuler, a mother who’d reportedly had 10 drinks before hitting the highway with five kids in her car. Her wrong-way collision killed four of them and herself, along with three men in another car.

Time says this sensational story has had a wrenching effect on women whose routines and responsibilities include ferrying kids from place to place. Drinking isn’t as funny or fun now that Schuler’s catastrophe has served as a wakeup call, especially for women who relate to her life.

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Ads for a certain slim cigarette aimed at women once crowed, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” In short, smoking was seen as twisted liberation for women. Sadly, the same is now true for drinking alcohol.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the percent of women arrested for DUI is increasing, while the percent of male DUI arrests drops. Men are still far more prone to DUI or DWI arrest — by almost a four-to-one ratio –  but in a changing world where women face increased pressures on economic fronts as their husbands lose jobs, and sometimes a tendency to behave like “the boys,” more and more women are stressed, driving cars and doing so while drunk.

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The Houston Chronicle reports a furor over a new Texas law, taking effect Sept. 1, which allows police to get a blood sample without a warrant in certain cases of suspected drunk driving.

Some consider it an outrage, violating civil liberties, the Constitution and perhaps apple pie and the flag. Others protest it will create a logjam at blood testing centers used by authorities in Houston, Harris County and elsewhere. In other words, it will be too time-consuming to test each potential DUI offender, so why not just let them go if they refuse a breathalyzer test?

Meanwhile, criminal defense attorneys worry that law enforcers will “run amok” if given such leeway.

All of these alarmists seem to disregard what’s truly alarming: Drunk drivers continue to wreak unspeakable carnage on America’s streets and highways. Since 1982, more than half a million innocent Americans have been killed in car accidents by drunk drivers, including many drunks who were repeat offenders. Think about it: More than half a million — dead — because people drove drunk.

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Who knew?
Turns out the federal government did six years ago. When it said nothing, thousands of Americans lost their lives. Others were seriously injured. And the nation is now stuck with a “serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.”
That’s the nutshell version of a shocking story in the July 21, 2009 edition of The New York Times about government suppression of vital safety information. The news does not surprise personal injury attorney Jim Adler who has long railed against government agencies that neglect their duty to protect the public.

“That’s why we call ourselves safety lawyers,” Adler said. “Remember the Ford Pinto and its exploding gas tank that killed so many in accidents? After Ford got sued by personal injury lawyers who won big settlements for victims, it redesigned that killer car. The same goes for those knobs on dashboards that used to seriously injure people in accidents. We got rid of them too. Now one of the biggest dangers on the road is caused by cell phones.”

Here are the disturbing details of the New York Times story: Back in 2003, researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wanted to do a long-term study to find out how dangerous it is to use a cell phone while driving. They had preliminary studies showing the scary potential of such multi-tasking behind the wheel. But the powers-that-be at NHTSA ruled against an in-depth study because they feared the wrath of Congress. NHTSA’s mission is to gather evidence, according to a former head of the agency, not to lobby the states.  In fact, it is strictly forbidden to engage in lobbying.

How much did NHTSA know and when did NHTSA know it? The decision not to do the study suppressed hundreds of pages of evidence showing the dangers of talking on a cell phone while driving. In 2002, NHTSA researchers could show that drivers on cell phones caused an estimated 995 highway fatalities and 240,000 accidents that year alone. Still, NHTSA withheld that information and denied the researchers’ request for a long-term study of 10,000 drivers. The agency didn’t want to look as though it were lobbying states to pass tougher laws against talking on cell phones while driving. Ultimately, many states did enact laws mandating the use of hands-free devices for drivers on cell phones. But that didn’t stop accidents. Research shows that talking distracts the brain from driving, with or without a hands-free device.

How did the story get out? The Los Angeles Times carried a report last year. That triggered a Freedom of information Act lawsuit by the Center for Auto Safety, a non-profit watchdog group, to get the suppressed documents. Mother Jones, another national publication, then did a story with new details. Two consumer advocacy groups, The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, have now provided the documents to The New York Times where they are available on the newspaper’s website.

Was it a government cover-up? That’s what the director of the Center for Auto Safety calls it. Clarence Ditlow says talking on a cell phone while driving is tantamount to driving with a blood alcohol level of .08, making drivers four times as likely to hit another car.

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July 4th weekend is a time to celebrate America’s liberty. Yet our liberties don’t include driving while impaired, a misjudgment which claims almost one third of all traffic deaths yearly, and an even higher 40 per cent of all traffic deaths on the mid-summer holiday.

Alcohol abuse by drivers crosses all geographic and socioeconomic lines. But motorcyclists have the highest proportion of alcohol abuse of any drivers on the road, and thus more motorcyclists die in traffic accidents on Independence Day than on any other day of the year.

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America is at war — not with another country, but with its own drunk drivers. You may not sense that your country is at war with them, but drunk drivers — by default if not design — are definitely at war with America, inflicting far more deaths, injuries and damages that many military conflicts.

Each year, the car carnage caused by drunk driving totals around 16,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries and many billions of dollars in damages.

For far too long, enough has been enough. Yet the plague continues. Each day, law-abiding people die in horrific accidents, and all because drunks were loose on our roads and highways. Despite decades of effort and outstanding crusaders such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the terrible toll persists.

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