In your story “House backs lower drunk driving limit,” (April 28) you state, “After California enacted a similar measure in 1989, alcohol-related auto deaths in that state have dropped 30 percent.”
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has published reports indicating that they cannot attribute any decline in alcohol-related fatalities and crashes to the adoption of the .08 standard. In fact, the actual yearly data show that for both California and the country overall, there was a nearly identical decline in alcohol-related fatalities in 1990 (the year the California law went into effect) over the previous four-year period.
“Alcohol-related” fatal crashes is a broad term. It refers to whether any of the drivers or non-occupants of the vehicle in a fatal accident is suspected of consuming any alcoholic beverages–even the slightest amount–regardless of whether the “drinker” was the cause of the accident.
Accordingly, the Illinois statistics regarding “drunk driving” fatalities include drivers who have had one drink. They also include drunk pedestrians who step in front of a vehicle driven by a non-drinking driver.
As a result, research indicates that up to 50 percent of all “alcohol-related” accidents are not “alcohol-caused” and would have occurred whether or not alcohol was present.
The only result of a lower limit will be to arrest currently legal drivers, subjecting them to fines, loss of license and possible jail when they were never part of the problem.
