I wish to respond to Nancy Foy’s letter (Jan. 30) describing the death of her husband at the hands of a three-time DUI offender and calling for increased penalties for drunken drivers.
Although Foy’s feelings are understandable, her letter perpetuates an important misconception about drunken driving. Since only a quarter of drunken driving fatalities involve drivers previously convicted of DUI, increased penalties for drunken driving do not effectively reduce drunken driving. On the other hand, well publicized enforcement, with an increase in the speed and certainty of punishment, has been shown to decrease fatality rates.
In 1990, the surgeon general’s conference on drunken driving concluded that two measures were most likely to decrease the death toll attributable to alcohol and drunken driving in the United States. One was to discourage consumption by raising taxes on alcohol, which, because of inflation and congressional inaction, now stand at a quarter the rate at which they were set in 1951.
The other was to encourage year-round random breath testing of all drivers passing through mobile roadblocks and administrative license suspension for those with an alcohol level over the legal limit. This strategy has been well tested in other countries and in pilot projects in this country with very gratifying results.
