None for the road the only answer

Lorraine Sommerfeld

When I was a kid, we'd all pile in the station wagon du jour and go visit friends for dinner. We'd run around all afternoon, the dads would drink a bunch of beers, and we'd all get back in the car and ride home. No seat belts and Dad driving. Because men drove. I can recall my mother – who hardly ever drank – driving maybe once or twice. Because men drove.

Looking back, it was ridiculous and dangerous. But everyone did it, and sometimes people died, and when they figured out it was deadly, the rules were changed. So if people can accept that seat belts were a good idea, why is there still so much pushback against not driving when you've been drinking?

Spot checks in my neck of the woods, Halton, over the holidays reported that impaired charges were up 10 times over last year. Ten times. There were 29 charges, up from three. And they stopped only 24,644 cars, unlike the 35,877 pulled over last year.

Dunno about you, but here's what I get from this: Nobody cares. We will drink and we will drive and we don't give a damn about the consequences. Point-zero-eight is a mythical number pulled from some bureaucratic hole in the ether, and even if caught, we can always find a way to fight it with legal posturing about sham equipment, crooked cops and a Get Out Of Jail Free Card so renowned it has its own name: the Two Beer Defence.

A legal numbers game, it contends "only" two beers could result in a misreading if one was consumed just before driving – registering on the breath, but not in the blood, hence not truly breaking the law.

Well, how about zero? What if, to drive a car, you just can't drink anything? I'll give up my "right" to drive home after a glass of wine if it means sweeping out the drunken denial kings and queens with the same broom.

Why do my son and his friends, currently under legal restriction that forbids any alcohol consumption during their probationary licence period, "get" to start drinking and driving?

Zero tolerance has been an excellent way to keep their designated driver sober.

A recent article in this paper quoted statistics, saying "fewer than 40 per cent of the drivers (2005, Canada) in fatal collisions had consumed alcohol at all."

Such dismissive wording; how about close to a staggering 40 per cent of fatal collisions involved alcohol, and not just in legally impaired amounts?

Manufacturers are turning out safer vehicles, which goes a long way in saving lives. But they recognize it's a reverse Field Of Dreams syndrome: Instead of "If you build it, they will come," they know it's really "If you build it, they will find another way to kill themselves."

Tally up the costs – human, property, social – and tell me again why the right to drive is embedded with the right to drink.

I despise a nanny state, truly. But when a drunk behind the wheel is so arrogant or deluded that he can mow down and kill a young mother of four and tell the attending police officer that "it was pretty stupid," or when a drunk can slam head-on into a taxi, killing the driver, I say go to zero.

Instead of making us argue that you're dangerous, you will have to justify why you need to drink before you get behind the wheel.

Lorraine Sommerfeld's column appears Saturday in Wheels and Mondays in Living.

www.lorraineonline.ca

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