{"id":7905,"date":"2010-01-18T08:23:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T13:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7905"},"modified":"2010-01-18T08:23:56","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T13:23:56","slug":"under-which-influence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7905","title":{"rendered":"Under Which Influence"},"content":{"rendered":"

The problem with “reporting” on drunk driving is that it is such a very, utterly, supremely emotional topic.\u00a0 Most peoples’ exposure to the subject is intensely personal<\/a>.\u00a0 So too with Strib editor Nancy Barnes and her encounter with a drunk:<\/p>\n

To this day, I can see the headlights of the old pickup bearing down on my side of the rural, two-lane highway in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Behind the wheel was a driver so drunk he had already passed out. I would later learn that he had so many drunken-driving convictions, his license had already been suspended for a decade. But there he was, driving again.<\/p>\n

I was a young mother of 30, with two baby girls, driving home from a late-night editing shift. I can remember worrying about who was going to care for my babies as, terrified, I instinctively yanked the steering wheel to the right and ran off the road. His truck clocked my little Honda, swiping it all the way down the driver’s side, but leaving me physically unharmed. The police found him passed out in a ditch not too much farther down the road.<\/p>\n

Many people, far too many people, are not as fortunate as I was that night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tha is, of course, tragically true.\u00a0 And since it bleeds, it does indeed lead:<\/p>\n

Every other day, someone in Minnesota is killed in a drunken-driving accident.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that rate is broadly down over the past thirty years or so.\u00a0 But it’s still a ghastly toll.<\/p>\n

The Strib <\/em>is starting a series purporting to examine drunk driving.\u00a0 I’m going to examine the examination; that’s what mediabloggers do.<\/p>\n

But first, a quick digression:<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Drugs cause immense\u00a0 pain and dislocation in our society.\u00a0 Thousands of people die of drug-related caues every year in the United States.\u00a0 And so for generations now the United States Government has embarked on a “War on Drugs” to, ostensibly, eradicate the drug problem in the United States.<\/p>\n

And yet, desipte the billions spent here and abroad every year to fight drugs, thousands die every year; gang members mowed down in drug-turf-related drive-by shootings; innocent bystanders to gang turf wars; dealers who hold out on their distributors; rivals gunned down over turf; cops shot intervening in drug-crimes; people killed in robberies as addicts try to get drug money…<\/p>\n

…and even a few overdoses (one source put it at under 300 a year) and the usual pathologies related to long-term addiction, which are tragic, but fade int o the background compared to America’s other big addictions, food and cigarettes and alcohol.\u00a0 Although, oddly, no American neighborhoods are being shot up by cigarette dealers, and the Mexican Army is not <\/em>engaged in any long-term military actions against Big Mac traffickers.<\/p>\n

IT doesn’t seem a huge leap that it’s the government prohibition that causes the biggest problems when it comes to drugs.\u00a0 An that’s not a radical observation; an organization as big and stupid as the entire US Government <\/em>realized much the same thing about its last attempt at social-engineering-by-prohibition, Prohibition.<\/p>\n

Like the War on Drugs, the “solution” was a dismal failure at addressing the “problem”, much less solving it.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Back to Barnes:<\/p>\n

Now, on the surface, there’s nothing new about drunken driving; it’s been a scourge on the roads for decades. This state, like others, has responded with tougher laws and stiffer penalties for those who climb behind the wheel and drive while intoxicated. Those laws have had some impact: The actual number of deaths has trended down over the last quarter-century.<\/p>\n

But last year, as one tragic example of a drunken-driving-related death after another made its way into the paper, the editors and reporters in the newsroom decided that it was time to take a fresh look at the depth of the toll on our state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cool.<\/p>\n

But, unfortunately, when Barnes says “Fresh Look”, what she really means – possibly without realizing it – is “very, very stale look, probably through the same precise lense that caused the “problem” you’re purportedly trying to address”.<\/p>\n

The numbers were startling, even to veteran journalists. They suggest that as a society, we still haven’t really come to grips with this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We need to define what “grips” means with this issue.\u00a0 Barnes has numbers, of course…:<\/p>\n

Some 35,000 people are arrested for drunken driving in Minnesota each year. More than half a million Minnesotans have a DWI on their record. More than 100,000 have had three or more arrests. It begs the question: Why are so many people still driving while smashed in Minnesota?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…but does citing them lead to asking the right questions, much less getting the right answers?<\/p>\n

Run the numbers in your head.\u00a0 Ten percent of Minnesotans have a DWI of some sort or another.\u00a0 Six tenths of a percent of Minnesotans are arrested every year – six out of every thousand.\u00a0 That is an immense law-enforcement effort<\/p>\n

\n
\n

A team of reporters is taking a sharp look at the stories behind those numbers, examining this issue from the highways, from the courtrooms and from the homes of grieving family members. In addition to these in-depth reports, we will highlight at least one drunken-driving case in print and online each week, and we will host an ongoing community discussion online about what can be done in Minnesota to make our roads safer.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I wonder if that “sharp look” is going to ask any of the following questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Of those 35,000 arrests a year, how many involve drivers whose drinking has been criminalized by the recent reduction of the legal Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) limit from .1% to .08%?<\/li>\n
  2. What percentage of fatalities were caused by drivers picked up with less than a .1% BAC?<\/li>\n
  3. Just as importantly, what was the average BAC involved in fatal “drunk driving accidents”?<\/li>\n
  4. What percentage of accidents and fatalities are caused by drivers with BACs less than .1%?<\/li>\n
  5. How many law enforcement resources are diverted to chasing people whose BAC is very, very low, and almost never cause accidents or fatalities?<\/li>\n
  6. How many fatalities might be averted if those resources were instead spent on keeping habitual drunks, and people arrested multiple times with BACs well above .12%, off the road?<\/li>\n
  7. If there is no plan to ask those questions – why?\u00a0 Is it because Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the motivator for this “reporting”, and the answers wouldn’t fit their agenda?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’d love to get that answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The problem with “reporting” on drunk driving is that it is such a very, utterly, supremely emotional topic.\u00a0 Most peoples’ exposure to the subject is intensely personal.\u00a0 So too with Strib editor Nancy Barnes and her encounter with a drunk: To this day, I can see the headlights of the old pickup bearing down on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7905"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7943,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7905\/revisions\/7943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}