Despite nearly 30 years of media campaigns detailing the dangers of drunken driving, almost one in 11 people admit to driving when they thought they were legally intoxicated, according to a survey released today by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
Of 2,509 adults surveyed, 9% said they had driven within the previous 30 days when they believed their blood-alcohol content was .08% or above, the legal threshold for drunken driving in all states and Washington, D.C. The AAA Foundation is a non-profit research and education group founded by AAA auto club in 1947.
The results resemble those of an unrelated, larger study released last week by the federal government. The Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration's survey of 127,000 adults found that 15% of drivers 18 and older said they had driven under the influence of alcohol at least once in the past year.
"It's frightening," says Aaron White, adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center who studies drunken driving among young people. "If you've got 10% of the people saying I drove when I was over the legal limit, you've probably got another chunk of people that would say I drank and drove but I wasn't over the limit."
White and his colleagues just completed a study of 5,000 recent high school graduates; they found 10% of the grads had drunk and driven within two weeks of being questioned. "The only thing that really works on a nationwide level is changing the culture," White says. "I think it's improving, but we still have a relaxed attitude toward drunken driving."
The most effective way to combat that attitude is with mandatory ignition interlocks for anyone convicted of drunken driving, says Heidi Castle, vice president of communications for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "People continue to drive drunk because they can, and ignition interlocks stop that," she says.
"I don't know that there's a single answer" for reaching motorists who still drive drunk, says Peter Kissinger, CEO of AAA Foundation. "Additional education is part of it. Increased enforcement is part of the solution. There is a sense that our elected officials don't have the political courage to put known countermeasures into law. We've made wonderful progress, but there are still elected officials that get hung up on the issue of privacy and Big Brother looking over us."
Highway safety agencies and safe driving advocates have been stymied by their inability to further cut crash deaths involving drunken drivers, which have remained at about 32% of all fatalities for the past decade.
"Drivers see traffic laws as guidance or suggestions, not as a law," says Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which represents state and territorial highway safety offices. "Drivers rationalize that it's OK to commit these behaviors since it's everyone else that crashes, not me."
GHSA supports sobriety checkpoints as an effective tool against drunken driving. They reduce such fatalities by 10%-20% — not because of the number of motorists caught but because they deter people from driving drunk in the first place, says James Fell, senior program director at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation who also spent 30 years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fell headed an NHTSA study that found that checkpoints in Tennessee cut drunken-driving injuries and fatalities by about 20%. Ten states prohibit checkpoints.
Mark Sieve, a Sarasota, Fla., waiter who was convicted of drunken driving in 1996, says the night he was arrested wasn't the first time he'd driven after drinking.
"Why would they drive knowing all the dangers out there? Habit, I think. And attitude," says Sieve, 48. "It's difficult for people who've been in the habit of drinking a certain amount and driving. Many times it takes a DUI arrest for their behavior to change."