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Persuasive Essay On Drinking And Driving

824 Words4 Pages

In 1897, George Smith, a 25-year-old London taxi driver became the first person to be arrested from drunk driving, after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.
Even though they invented the Breathalyzer, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that public awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving increased and police officers were getting more serious about drinking while driving. Lawmakers were trying to get more people to follow the laws about drinking while driving and creating more detailed laws. In the United states the legal drinking age was 21. Some of the punishments you have to go though are jail time, fines ,loss of their driver's licenses and increased car insurance rates. Some drunk drivers have to have special devices like breathalyzers installed in their vehicles to test their blood alcohol level. These devices make it so you have to breathe into a device on the cars dashboard. The device measures the amount of alcohol vapors in your breath and you can’t drive if your BAC is below a certain level. …show more content…

In 1936, Dr.Rolla Harger a professor at the University of Indiana patented the drunkometer. It was a balloon-like device, all you had to do was blow into it and it would determine the amount of alcohol in your body by mixing the alcohol vapors in your breath with a chemical solution. It was “the very first stable breath-testing instrument to measure alcohol levels.” In 1938, research by the American Medical Association and the National Safety Council made the new commonly used BAC limit in your body,1.5. It became the first legal limit for blood alcohol concentration. This made the perfect test for police officers to determine whether someone had too much to

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The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommends lowering the legal blood-alcohol level to 0.05 percent. Research showed impairment in drivers with alcohol levels above that, increasing the likelihood of an accident. The agency also recommended that states require breathalyzers for all DWI offenders. The driver must exhale into the breathalyzer before starting his/her car; if their blood alcohol level is above the legal limit, the engine won’t start. There are also safety steps that you, as an individual can take.

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Traffic crash rates have been inversely related with the minimum legal drinking age since the 1970’s. Studies conducted since the 1980’s analyzed how the change in the MLDA affected the outcome of total traffic crashes for youth, drinking-driving convictions, single-vehicle nighttime crash fatalities, and alcohol problems among youth. The MLDA needs to be at 21, because 67% of the studies completed have concluded that there was a significant decrease in traffic crashes and crash fatalities when the drinking age was higher. In addition, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that in 1987 alone, 1,071 traffic crashes were prevented because of the MLDA of 21 (NHTSA 1989). Lower rates of death caused by vehicle crashes were found in states with higher MLDA’s throughout these various studies, and a 16% decrease in vandalism rates were observed in 4 states that raised their MLDA.

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On May 3, 1980, Cari Lightner was struck and killed by a drunk driver in Fair Oaks, California (Mothers Against Drunk Driving, History, n.d.). The driver had recently been arrested for Driving Under the Influence hit-and-run and left Cari’s body at the scene (Mothers Against Drunk Driving, History, n.d.). Cari’s mother, Candace formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving because of that incident. In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was implemented in the United States that imposed a federal penalty for states that did not raise the minimum legal drinking age to 21 for purchase and possession of alcohol (Mothers Against Drunk Driving, History, n.d.). This made a radical change to the United States as how we see it now.

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In addition to having little effect on alcohol induced car accidents, it has also created a culture of binge drinking and a harmful alcohol

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