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Affiliation
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Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA. |
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Abstract
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With the advent of widespread automobile driving in the early 1900s, laws were passed to make drunk driving a crime. But it was not until police officers could measure the blood alcohol level of drivers that arrest rates went up. In the late 1910s, Swedish physiologist Erik Widmark developed a method for measuring alcohol in the blood. An American biochemist, Rolla Harger, invented a device in 1931 that calculated blood alcohol levels from air blown into a balloon. In 1954, Robert Borkenstein invented the progenitor of the modern Breathalyzer, a portable device that used exhaled air to measure the amount of alcohol in someone's blood.
Yet rather than use these devices to encourage uniformity, different countries established very different limits. Norway, for example, passed a “per se” law in 1936 criminalising levels that were 0·05% (50 mg/dL) or higher, irrespective of the driver's ability to perform roadside tests. This amount was enough to impair most drivers, albeit to different degrees. Punishments were harsh, including prison. Such laws worked primarily through deterrence. The USA, by contrast, set its level three times higher, at 0·15%. Although impaired drivers with levels between 0·05% and 0·15% could also potentially be arrested for drunk driving, in practice very few such individuals were convicted or had their licences revoked. This situation meant that it was possible to drive legally in the USA with dramatically high blood alcohol levels, even if you were a recidivist or had killed or injured someone. Other countries lined up between these two extremes.
Why was there such variability? An important factor was the impact of the temperance movement, which saw alcohol as a vice. A Union of Temperance Drivers was formed in Sweden in the early 1930s and later spread to Norway, Finland, and Denmark. In the USA, however, the failed attempt at Prohibition from 1919 to 1933 led to a backlash against a moralistic mindset. Legal officials viewed drunk drivers less as criminal menaces than as alcoholics in need of rehabilitation. Two quotations underline the different attitudes. “When a man goes to a party where alcoholic drinks are likely to be served, and he is not fortunate enough to have a wife who drives but does not drink”, Norwegian lawyer Johannes Andenæs wrote, “he will leave his car at home or he will limit his consumption to a minimum”. Contrast this statement with one from the committee that devised American legal limits: “One of the cornerstones of our American way of life is the element of personal freedom, the maximum liberty of the individual to do as he pleases within the restrictions of majority-approved laws.” This philosophy remained in place in the USA even after the government issued a report in 1968 estimating that 25 000 Americans died each year due to drunk driving.
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Language: en |