The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that examines which interventions (programs, systems, and policies) are most promising to prevent injuries and death from alcohol-impaired driving, the barriers to action and approaches to overcome them, and which interventions need to be changed or adopted. This report makes broad-reaching recommendations that will serve as a blueprint for the nation to accelerate the progress in reducing alcohol-impaired driving fatalities.
In order to help reduce the more than 10,000 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities that occur in the United States each year, the report recommends a number of actions, such as lowering state laws criminalizing alcohol-impaired driving from 0.08 to 0.05 percent blood alcohol concentration (BAC), increasing alcohol taxes significantly, strengthening policies to prevent illegal alcohol sales to people under 21 and to already-intoxicated adults, enacting all-offender ignition interlock laws, and providing effective treatment for offenders when needed.
The committee that wrote the report noted that on average since 1982, one-third of all traffic fatalities are due to alcohol-impaired driving, and nearly 40 percent of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities are victims other than the drinking driver, the report says. In 2010, the total economic cost of these crashes was $121.5 billion, including medical costs, earnings losses, productivity losses, legal costs, and vehicle damage. Rural areas are disproportionally affected by alcohol-impaired driving crashes and fatalities.
The report notes that it can be difficult for individuals to understand how many alcoholic beverages it will take for them to be impaired. Individuals differ in their degree of impairment due to several factors such as weight, age, gender, race, and ability to metabolize alcohol, the report says. In addition, inconsistent serving sizes and the combination of alcohol with caffeine and energy drinks, among other factors, undermine individuals’ ability to estimate their level of impairment.
Most strategies to reduce alcohol-impaired driving have focused on decreasing the likelihood that someone will drive after they are already impaired by alcohol through traditional enforcement and criminal justice approaches; however, broadening the focus to also encompass reducing drinking to the point of impairment is critically important, the report says.
This Summary Last Modified On: 2/1/2018