While many people have a certain degree of control over their drinking, some parties and social situations can cause that control to slip, leading to a potential impaired driving charge. This is not to say that you should skip such social gatherings altogether, but it helps if you keep track of how much you drink over a certain span of time. Limiting yourself to only one or two drinks an hour can help keep you from getting too far over 80 at any point during the event. Drinking and driving can have far-reaching, devastating effects for you, your family, and anybody who happens to be near you on the road. The best way to avoid this fate is to know as much as you can about the consequences of drinking and driving, as well as how you can keep yourself out of situations where you might violate the law. High-visibility saturation patrols consist of a large number of law enforcement officers patrolling a specific area, usually at times and locations where crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers are more common.
- Only 3.3% were arrested for DUI, 1.6% using proportions by drinker type from BRFSS as weights for computing this percentage.
- According to Responsibility.org, 29% of the nation’s fatal crashes involved an alcohol-impaired driver.
- An ignition interlock device is a breath test device connected to a vehicle’s ignition.
Assessment and treatment are critical to the success of driving while impaired (DWI) courts, which are specialized courts focused on changing the behavior of people who are convicted of alcohol-impaired driving. Higher rates of arrest for DUI of unemployed persons as distinct from persons not in the labor force which we also measured have been documented by others (Bernhoft, Hels, & Hansen, 2008; Vaez & LaFlamme, 2005). We included binary variables for drinker type, with other drinker type, the omitted reference group, as explanatory variables in our analysis of drinking and driving episodes in the past year and arrests, citations, and chargeable accidents in the last 3 years. Of fatal crashes in 2008, 32% were alcohol-related (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2009). Further, the link between binge drinking and alcohol-related death (Sull, Yi, Nam, & Ohrr, 2009) and morbidity (Naimi et al., 2003; Sundell, Salomaa, Vartiainen, Poikolainen, & Laatikainen, 2008) is well established. Binge drinking, defined as more than 4 drinks on 1 occasion for females or 5 drinks for males, occurs in all age groups (Naimi et al., 2003; Wechsler & Austin, 1998).
Reaction Time
Getting behind the wheel after having even just a few drinks can prove to be dangerous to yourself, pedestrians, and other drivers. If you had those first two beers that raised your BAC to 0.04 and now you what are the consequences of drinking and driving drink two more beers to raise your BAC to 0.08, your likelihood of an accident goes up drastically. At 0.08 BAC, a driver is 11 times more likely than the non-drinking driver to be involved in a crash.
Despite marked reductions in the proportions of motorists who drive after drinking and in alcohol-related traffic fatalities, alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious threat to the nation’s health. In 2002, 41 percent of traffic deaths and 9 percent of traffic injuries were alcohol related. As many as 44 percent of people killed in crashes involving drinking drivers are people other than the drinking driver. Despite reductions in alcohol-related traffic fatalities since the early 1980s, alcohol remained a factor in 41 percent of the traffic deaths recorded in the United States in 2002. Drinking in social contexts mainly distinguished other drinkers from heavy, binge, and heavy binge drinkers.
Driving or Operating a Vehicle
Major alternative sources of recent data on drinking and driving behavior are the BRFSS and NESARC. The BRFSS contains questions on drinking and driving and alcohol consumption within the last month, but does not measure arrests or citations, chargeable accidents, addictions, use of other substances, and personality factors. NESARC is the most comprehensive survey of drinking patterns, addiction, psychiatric factors, and family history in the U.S. (Chou et al., 2006; Vaughn et al., 2011).
You should talk to your agent to see what can be done, if anything, to mitigate this increase. Safe driving requires focus, coordination, good judgment, and quick reactions to the environment. Poor judgment can lead to speeding, running red lights, and other risky driving maneuvers. This is especially dangerous when your vision, coordination, and reaction time are also impaired. You may experience some loss of judgement after just two drinks, while significant impaired judgment occurs at a BAC of .08%. You may also experience a decline in your self-control and reasoning at this level of intoxication.