The Two Faces of DUI
When the government lowered the national blood-alcohol threshold to .08 from its original level, .10, it didn’t exactly achieve its intended purpose. Instead of curtailing drunk driving fatalities, the legislation has only resulted in more social drinkers getting arrested. After all, the people who cause accidents have, on average, a BAC of .17 – twice the intoxication level of most of the people who are being arrested. The new DUI laws have been likened to lowering the speed limit from 65 to 60 in order to catch people who drive 100 miles per hour.
Meanwhile, in a supreme act of irony, the number of drunk-driving related accidents have actually gone up since the law was passed!
Even the U.S. Government Accountability Office admitted that the new DUI law is ineffective, stating "the evidence does not conclusively establish that .08 BAC laws by themselves result in reductions in the number and severity of crashes involving alcohol."
In other words, rather than reducing the number of drunk driving accidents, the current DUI laws have simply created more criminals.
