License to Kill

Kory Tafel

March 3, 2005

Essay 5

License to Kill

Imagine being in a bar with a few of your good friends. Everyone is drinking and having a good time. You are going to leave and go home, but you friends won't let you because they know the dangers of driving after having a few drinks. Instead they call a cab to give you a ride home. You would be extremely lucky to have such smart friends. Drunk driving is a very serious problem in our society today, but it is becoming socially unacceptable causing the numbers of alcohol related traffic fatalities t o decline considerably.

Drunk driving can be very deadly. Yet many people drive while under the influence everyday. Drivers who are drunk are blamed for the loss of as many as twenty-five thousand lives in highway crashes each year and hundreds of thousands of severe injuries.

It is thought that drunk drivers have a long history of doing this and many prior arrests. In addition, most of those killed are just innocent victims whose behavior did not contribute to their deaths. These last two statements are both false. On aver age a drunk driver that kills has never been involved in an alcohol related accident before and have no prior convictions for drunk driving. The part about the people killed are just innocent bystanders is unexaggerated also. Most of the drunk drivers victims are the drivers themselves, their often passengers, and the drunken pedestrians and cyclists. Despite this drunk driving is still very dangerous. It is the leading cause of unintentional injury deaths in America today. In fact it is said that about 40 % of the population will be involved in a alcohol related crash during their life. Drunk driving is especially dangerous to young people, who seem to be more involved than others. Drunk driving is the number one cause of death among young people, accounting for 20% of all deaths from ages 15 to 20. Drunk driving is such a hard thing to overcome though. In our society alcohol is overwhelmingly accepted as a facilitator of sociable interaction, and the great majority of adults drink. But steps a re being taken and the numbers of deaths are declining.

Alcohol-related traffic fatalities have been decreasing lately. As a proportion of all traffic fatalities it has been decreased since 1999. In fact since 1999 the number of alcohol related traffic fatalities has decreased 30%, from 25,165 to 17,699, while alcohol-related traffic fatalities, as a proportion of all traffic fatalities, decreased from 57% to 45%. This is a great achievement when you consider that the number of miles traveled has increased 40% since then. For the past 4 years the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities has been dropping steadily. With the help of a growing number of support groups and tougher penalties the numbers should drop even more in the next few years to come.

The numbers of accidents have been dropping for a number of reasons. The states