Although drunk driving is a less deadly problem now than it was before states began to reduce blood-alcohol limits in the 1980s, practically everybody would like to see the roads made safer from impaired motorists. If only Americans could agree on how to achieve this.
In May, the National Transportation Safety Board served up a new round of debate on the topic when it urged states to lower their legal blood-alcohol percentages from .08 to .05.
The board calculates that doing this would save about 1,000 of the nearly 10,000 people who die each year in the United States in crashes caused by drunken drivers. But opponents of the proposal, including the alcoholic beverage and restaurant industries, say there are better ways to attack drunken driving. Even the powerful organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving isn't sold on the blood-alcohol approach, preferring another element of the NTSB proposal -- improving locking-device technology to keep people convicted of DUI from re-offending.
The Opinion pages' Question of the Week for readers is: Should California lower the legal limit for blood-alcohol percentages from .08 to .05?
Here's one way to look at this: The U.S. is one of few industrialized countries that allow something more than .05.
Another way is to translate an abstract-seeming number into cold hard liquor. To avoid a .05 percent blood-alcohol limit, a typical 170-pound man would have to hold himself to three drinks and a 120-pound woman must stop at two. To many, that doesn't sound like much.
But the NTSB thinks the difference between the current and proposed limits is huge.
Note the difference since 1982, when the NTSB recommended trimming the limit from .10 to .08, inspiring state-by-state changes that were complete in 2004. (California changed in 1990.) In 1982, 21,113 people were killed in U.S. drunken-diving crashes; the annual toll now is less than half that.
Were blood-alcohol changes the whole story? Would new changes reduce tragedies?
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