Alcohol Driving Facts

Driving while intoxicated is probably the most well-studied injurious consequence of drinking. Whereas the older scientific literature on drinking and driving focused on the effects of high blood alcohol levels on simple reaction time, on the visual system, and on gross impairment, it is now known that the effects of alcohol are much broader and occur at relatively low blood alcohol levels. For example, alcohol use is coupled with increased risk taking and impulsivity, at least among young males (Cherpitel, 1993), and decreased seat belt use (CDC, 1991) which invariably places drinkers at increased risk for injury. Moreover, whereas high blood alcohol levels ( .15 percent) may produce obvious visible impairment in the absence of any testing (Brick and Carpenter, 2001), it is nowknown that very lowlevels of alcohol (.02 to .03 percent) impair the performance of complex divided attention tasks, at least in laboratory studies. Divided attention is believed to be a critical factor in a variety of tasks outside the laboratory, and divided attention failure is the most likely cause of motor vehicle collisions at blood alcohol levels above .05 percent, for it is at this level that impairment translates

into actual highway statistics (in which the intoxicated driver is the cause of the accident). At higher blood alcohol levels (e.g., .15 percent or more), impairment in proprioception, visual perception, and lengthened simple reaction time are additional significant contributing factors to motor vehicle accidents.Regardless of which functions are affected by alcohol, impaired drivers clearly present a public health risk because of the increased number of accidental injuries due to intoxication. About 16,000 people are killed each year as a result of drunk driving (NIAAA, 2000), and about 10 percent of all personal injury accidents and at least 180,000 to 200,000 property and personal injury crashes, respectively, are caused by alcohol intoxication per year (Wieczorek, 1995).

Posted in: alcohol