Practical drunk driving prevention

On Friday, 21-year-old IU student Drew Allen Mendez drove his car through the Sample Gates, causing as much as $25,000 in damage. He was drunk.

And we’re lucky he didn’t kill anyone.

The Indiana Lifeline Law is an important piece of legislation you should know about.
Statistically, though, you’ll have a better chance of saving a life if you memorize the phone number for the local cab dispatch.

We can’t get serious about tackling alcohol-related deaths in this state — and deaths that occur as a result of a drinking culture at our University — unless we also get serious about drunk driving.

One obvious solution is to simply commit to not driving if you’ve had anything to drink at all. While that’s a perfect remedy, I’m too cynical to believe that kind of mindset will ever become commonplace.

Just look how effective abstinence-only education has been.

The real problem is most Hoosiers have five or more years of driving experience before they’re allowed to legally drink alcohol.Doing something every day for five years will make anyone feel invincible — more likely to take chances when the time comes.

The legal limit is .08. But ask five different people what that feels like or how many drinks that is and you’ll get five different answers.

We set that limit with the express purpose of determining a boundary between safe and unsafe levels for the operation of a vehicle.

Police officers often go through a training program designed to familiarize themselves with the physical feeling of .08 by more or less getting drunk and taking breathalyzer tests along the way.  Why haven’t we also taken a similar approach when teaching young drivers?

A similar program for newly-21 drivers would be a start.

Getting serious about drunk driving mewans acknowledging slogans like “Don’t drink and drive” and “Buzzed driving is drunk driving” are simultaneously too trite and too ambiguous to ever be truly effective.

Instead, we should be giving practical, useful information about the reasonable limits we’ve legislated to young drivers.

Anything less is just reckless.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu