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Anti-alcohol
Zeal Has Replaced
MADD's Common Sense
John Doyle, Scripps Howard News
Service
It started when you brought
your kids to the restaurant. Anxiety began to set in when you ordered
that single glass of wine. Driving home, you hit a police roadblock.
And the courts took your kids away.
Sound like the trailer
for a bad movie? It's actually a top priority for Mothers Against
Drunk Driving. This previously admirable group has slipped into
pure anti-alcohol zealotry with its ''zero tolerance'' campaign
against drinking anything at all before driving. If you are a divorced
parent who drives your kids safely home after having a single drink,
MADD wants you to lose your parental rights. That's right, MADD
wants this Prohibitionist requirement written into every separation
agreement and divorce decree.
Reducing the legal blood-alcohol
concentration, or BAC, arrest threshold to zero - whether for divorced
parents or anyone else - may sound like a get-tough policy, but
even MADD knows that won't lessen the drunk driving problem. During
the last few years, nearly every state in the nation has reduced
its BAC limit from .10 percent to .08 percent. The result? Drunk
driving fatalities have actually increased.
The Los Angeles Times recently
reported ''some experts worry that new laws will actually reduce
the attention placed on catching highly intoxicated drivers that
cause the most deadly accidents.'' Indeed, the founder of MADD says
''the movement I helped create has lost direction. (Lowering legal
BAC limits) ignores the real core of the problem... If we really
want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on
the road.''
At their news conference
announcing the zero tolerance policy for divorced parents, MADD
highlighted two tragic cases in which mothers killed or injured
their children in alcohol-related accidents. Both women had a BAC
approximately three times the legal limit. Clearly MADD's call for
zero tolerance would have had no impact on these product abusers.
Drunken drivers involved
in fatal accidents have an average BAC of .16 percent, which is
already twice the legal limit in most states. To get that drunk,
a 180-pound man would have to drink eight beers in one hour, or
one drink every seven minutes. According to Herb Simpson, the winner
of the National Commission Against Drunk Driving's 2003 ''Humanitarian
of the Year'' Award, ''These people don't have a glass of wine with
dinner or a couple of beer(s). They're having 8, 10, 12, 14... ''
Even MADD admits that the drunk driving problem has been reduced
to a ''hard core of alcoholics.''
No one with an IQ above
room temperature condones drunk driving, but it is absurd to equate
alcohol abusers with the 25 million Americans who drink responsibly
prior to driving. Scientific evidence proves that this legal behavior
is far safer than driving while talking on a cell phone with a hands-free
device. Studies from the University of Utah, the New England Journal
of Medicine and elsewhere show that drivers using a hands-free cell
phone are more ''impaired'' than drivers at .08 percent BAC.
Lowering BAC limits below
the ubiquitous .08 percent will only fill our courtrooms with adults
who, by current law and common sense, are driving responsibly. Policemen
have better things to do than wait around to testify about a divorced
father who had one beer at a ballpark before driving his kids home.
And let's not forget the six hours policemen can spend - mostly
on paperwork - just making and processing a DWI arrest.
So why would anyone want
to focus law enforcement resources on a mom who had a glass of wine
with dinner? Ideology.
All too often, traffic
safety policy has been hijacked by puritanical opponents of adult
beverages. Utah recently passed a MADD-blessed law lowering BAC
levels to .05 percent for repeat offenders with kids in the car.
George Van Komen, who co-wrote an original version of the law calling
for .02 percent, opposes all alcohol consumption, period. He leads
an organization formerly called the Anti-Saloon League and the National
Temperance League.
Temperance is also on the
tongue of MADD's highest officials. MADD President Wendy Hamilton
recently wrote ''the thought that (driving) can be successfully
combined with alcohol on the part of the driver or even the passengers
defies any logic I can imagine.'' Even the passengers? Is MADD so
anti-alcohol that they oppose designated drivers? A lobbying behemoth,
MADD has an annual budget of $46 million. It spends more than $12
million a year on salaries and benefits. Now that the drunk driving
problem has been reduced to alcoholics who happily ignore their
PR campaigns, MADD has become an institution in search of a mission.
Its latest campaigns are demonstrative of its new cause: prohibition,
drip by drip.
The peril posed by alcohol
abusers, who are the primary cause of the nation's drunk driving
problem today, will remain undiminished as long as law enforcement
focuses on the wrong target: adults who drive legally, responsibly
and safely after drinking moderately. Political and financial resources
being finite, it is imperative not to spend them chasing responsible
parents just to keep special interest groups in business.
John Doyle is executive
director of the American Beverage Institute, an association of restaurants
committed to the responsible serving of adult beverages
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