I've seen the cold bodies on the cold mortuary slabs of those innocents killed by drunk drivers. Some of them were really quite pretty people. I don't have any problem in moral condemnation of those who take control of a ton or so of metal and drive it when they are pissed up. I'd lock them up every weekend for 6 months or so and take their licences off them for a lot longer than a year. In the times when you can easily get a taxi it shows a complete lack of judgement to get into a car when drinking. Good judgement is mainly what airline pilots get paid for, and I wouldn't give the guy a job.
Moral indignation over, lets talk about some facts and figures which some of you might find interesting.
Back in my med school days we had several lectures from those who "know about this sort of thing" (a physiology lecturer of mine was involved in the original design of the Lion Intoximeter) and one of them produced a very interesting graph. It showed the blood alcohol levels of drivers who had been killed in Road Traffic Accidents.
The graph was of accident frequency vs blood alcohol level, and looked something like this...
Accident frequency
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0.........1/2.......1....2 (pints of beer eq)
So there was actually a minimum at around 1/2 pint of beer, by the time you got a pint's worth of beer down your neck you were as good/bad as you were when you were sober. At around 2 pints of beer the curve took off exponentiantially as you got completely off your head and completely unable to know what the hell you were really doing.
Apparently you concentrate better with a bit of booze in you which (at lower levels) has a better positive effect on you than the negative effects which are well known effect of even a small amount of our favourite tipple. Large amounts of this 'lack of judgement juice' is what gives us that horrible feeling in the morning (whether to gnaw your arm off or wake the fat trollop you found so attractive the night before).
They also did tests with London bus drivers who were extremely accurate at judging whether they could fit their busses through a gap. They would be asked to drive between traffic cones in a car park and their judgement started to fail significantly at about 1+ pints of beer.
There are moves now to put the legal limit at 50mg/100ml, which makes sense as you are not neccessarily a worse driver at that level. Also, most of us have up to that level of alcohol in our systems due to normal fermentation of sugars in our gut. It would be a real bummer to get busted because you had just had a pint of orange juice. Mormons should take note, we have alcohol in us without boozing it up, and as long as you don't take control of a car there really should be no reason to top it up a bit with several pints of your favourite 5% looney lager juice.
(Edited because graph didn't show)
[ 09 January 2002: Message edited by: slim_slag ]
[ 09 January 2002: Message edited by: slim_slag ]</p>