Word: drunkness
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...Friends don't let friends drive drunk." Every child of the '80s remembers that ubiquitous anti-drunk-driving slogan, though it hasn't had much impact on celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, who was arrested Tuesday for the second time for driving under the influence. Now a new study shows that there's a much more direct and effective way to take drunk drivers off the road: state laws that revoke a driver's license on the spot, rather than waiting until after a possible criminal conviction...
...study, published in the August 2007 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, looks at data from 46 states and is one of the most comprehensive studies on the impact of drunk-driving laws in the U.S. It finds that suspending a drunk driver's license immediately at the time of arrest reduces alcohol-related fatal crash involvement by 5%, which translates to at least 800 lives being spared in the U.S. per year...
Alexander Wagenaar, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida's College of Medicine and lead author of the study, says that the reason revoking a drunk driver's license right away works better than waiting until after a conviction, which can take up to a year in some states, is simple timing: if you do something wrong, you should suffer the consequences immediately. It's a basic behavior-curbing tenet called negative reinforcement that works on rats in the lab, and on humans just as well. "The speed with which the punishment is applied is very important...
...Still, drunk driving remains a huge and deadly national problem. Approximately 17,000 people are killed in alcohol-related crashes per year, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports that in the past year, 17% of drivers in the U.S. admitted getting behind the wheel after drinking...
...Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Tennessee. Most of these states have policies that allow officers to revoke a driver's license after conviction, or immediately with repeat offenders, but Wagenaar's study found that such laws do little to deter drunk driving or to reduce fatalities...