OLD WINE IN NEW SKINS:

When Drunk Driving Deterrence Becomes Neo-Prohibition (Radley Balko, 10/09/05, Cato Institute)

This fall Mothers Against Drunk Driving marks its 25th anniversary. The organization certainly has much to celebrate: Deaths from drunk driving are down more than 35 percent since the early 1980s. We no longer chuckle at the bumbling drunk who can barely get his key into the ignition — we scorn him. Hopefully, we arrest him, too.

Unfortunately, MADD has come to outlive and outgrow its original mission. By the mid-1990s, deaths from drunk driving began to level off, after 15 years of progress. The sensible conclusion to draw from this was that the occasional drunk driver had all but been eradicated. MADD's successes had boiled the problem down to a small group of hard-core alcoholics.

It was at about this time that MADD began to move in a different direction, one not so much aimed at reducing drunk driving fatalities but at stripping DWI defendants of basic criminal rights. MADD also seemed to expand its mission to one of discouraging the consumption of alcohol in general — what critics call "neo-prohibition."

MADD's biggest victory on this front was a nationwide blood-alcohol threshold of .08, down from .10.

Insightful to grasp that the campaign aghainst drunk driving flows from the same Puritan impulse as Prohibition did, but it's nonsense to equate the societal judgement that you shouldn't drink and drive with the idea that you shouldn't drink at all.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2005 4:14 PM