Drunk Driving
Laws Making Impact In California
From a news story by
CNN San Francisco Reporter Greg Lefevre
June 28, 2000
The death of Deputy Jeff Anderson brought Rebecca Bearden to the reality
that drinking drivers were not just the butt of party jokes. They were
killers needing to be stopped.
Rebecca Bearden says of her accident, "We were hit head on by a
wrong way drunk driver, point-two-8 with two priors and he hit us. My
fiancée was killed; I was very critically injured and not expected
to live."
That's when she joined MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
While drunk driving has been illegal in California since 1911, enforcement
was lax until MADD set out to change society's perception of the drunk
driver.
Rebecca Bearden says, "It's not just a car accident. It is a crime,
and it is a violent crime. And we have worked very hard and have succeeded
in convincing society that that is so."
That change in mind-set meant that designated drivers were not sissies
but socially responsible. Citizens embraced sobriety checkpoints as
an acceptable inconvenience. It was ok to have a sober high school graduation.
Spike Helmick of the California
Highway Patrol says, "Those things have changed. It wasn't that
way 25 years ago.
Your chances of surviving
on a California freeway are much better than the US average in part
because the cops and the CHP are out there doing what they can to keep
the drunks from killing you."
Alcohol related deaths in California have gone DOWN 61-percent since
1980. While drivers and miles driven has gone UP 15-percent. The sanctions
are swift and steep. In California an officer can yank a driver’s
license on the spot if the driver tests drunk.
Cliff Helander is a research manager for the Department of Motor Vehicles,
"We evaluated the law after it was implemented in 1990 and found
that it has a reduction of about 15-percent on alcohol related matters."
The chance of being arrested again is cut in half if the driver completes
a treatment program.
The work is far from over. California still arrests a drunk driver every
six minutes.And one in fifty California drivers know someone killed
by a drunk driver. There's much yet to do.
Additional Notes:
Rebecca refers to the drunk
driver having a .28 blood alcohol concentration (BAC). The amount
of alcohol in a person’s body is measured by the weight of the
alcohol in a certain volume of blood. It is expressed as grams per deciliter
of blood. In most states a person is considered intoxicated (drunk enough
to make driving ability impaired) with a .10 BAC. The
legal level in California is .08. To understand what this means go to
this web site.
For further information look
at the entire document and its table of contents.
Also, look at:
Related Stories
Related Sites
© 1999-2000 Cable News Network, Inc.
Western/Pacific Literacy Network
Western/Pacific LINCS
All Rights Reserved
|
