Drinking and Driving Paper

Drinking and Driving

Putting the rope around your neck

(or the handcuffs on your wrists)

By eRnie Prencke

For Dr. M. Coon’s Public Speaking Class

Middle Georgia College

Cochran – 2005

In Colombia twenty one persons die every day; there are 7579 fatal victims every year, one hundred thousand injured persons, and thousands whose lives, families and friendships end up torn after terrible traffic accidents. The economical loses of chaotic traffic, and traffic accidents easily go over U$ 10 BN every year, and the problem doesn’t get any better.

It is like if a passenger aircraft crashed every week killing one hundred and forty people every time, and if so, people wouldn’t be so “cool” about it, authorities would probably take a lot more security measures.

This doesn’t happen with MVA’s (Motor Vehicle Accidents), maybe because deaths occur in small numbers, one, two, three, in the most extreme and outrageous, and unbelievable case, four. These deaths are considered distant events, things that wouldn’t happen to ME, errors made by OTHER “stupid” people; it is very hard for one to imagine that one is going to be involved in a MVA after turning the ignition, everything in our own happy worlds is perfect, until we collide with reality (or a streetlamp).

Our attitude towards these doesn’t help either, since people are always looking for the external causes of the accident, such as: a hole in the pavement, wrongfully designed roads (sometimes happens, you would be surprised of what you can find in poor third world countries), bad tires, wrongfully designed suspension in the cars (remember the Ford Explorer problem?) and any other of the twenty five hundred parts a car has, but no one ever focuses on the driver, on the moment of the accident all excuses, and errors are focused on “OTHERS”, no one ever wants to take responsibility, when the real causes lay on both the drivers, regardless of whoever takes the blame; the cause I’m focusing on is when a driver is knowingly, or unknowingly unable to drive a motor vehicle, this is when speed, stupidities, and injury or death happen.

A toast to death!

The persons unable to drive are not just the regular “roll off the bar” drunks, but also the more social, and decent drinkers, that just have A beer, A glass of wine, or A glass of scotch, these limit a person’s capacity to react to “a road situation”.

Alcoholic beverages make a person’s response to a situation slower, and not just slower, but also clumsy, and reckless; alcohol clouds the senses making a person’s attention to get distracted easily, it generates a false sensation of security, which predisposes a person to exceed speed limits, violate traffic laws, end up in jail, or worse; in the morgue.

It is a myth that coffee or other stimulants (i.e. Cocaine) annul alcohol’s damaging effects, they just make it worse, or make it seem like its gone, BUT IT IS NOT, a person may be high in cocaine, and might not feel drunk, but the breathalyzer, and the zigzag straight line in the road say otherwise.

Get high and fly!

Alcohol is not the only substance that can alter a person’s state of mind; the weakest drug can be far stronger than the strongest, cheapest, meanest and most vicious type of alcohol.

It is a person’s choice to do drugs and potentially ruin his or her life; but it is a very different thing when this person decides to turn the key on the ignition and drive while under the effect of drugs, in this exact moment, this person is making a choice of life for others, this is ILLEGAL.

Drugs are known