Laura Tate
Support MADD’s plan to eliminate drunk driving
The California Highway Patrol heavily promoted its “maximum enforcement” period for the holiday weekend that began 6 p.m. Wednesday and lasted until Sunday evening in the days preceding the start of the crackdown. The effort was to reduce the number of speeders, drunk drivers and other reckless motorists, and to enforce the seatbelt law, and therefore hopefully reduce accidents and deaths on the state’s roads during the four-day weekend.
CHP officials cited the statistic of 60 deaths last year during the Thanksgiving weekend; half of those deaths were of people who were not wearing their seatbelts.
This year, the CHP stated in a press release, “Many of those who didn’t get the message paid the price. DUI arrests by CHP officers totaled 1,669 this Thanksgiving holiday compared to 1,521 last year.”
In the most recent statistics by the CHP in 2002, 22,358 people were injured and 850 killed in California in accidents caused by drivers under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The national group, MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, cites statistics that 13,000 people are killed each year nationwide by drunk drivers with an illegal blood alcohol concentration of .08 or above.
“This represents more than 1,000 families every month that must live with the tragic consequences of drunk driving,” MADD’s Web site states.
In California last year, 40 percent of traffic fatalities were due to alcohol-related accidents.
Forty-two people died in road accidents during this year’s holiday weekend.
One wonders, were they families with young children on their way to grandma and grandpa’s house? Were children left fatherless, motherless, or did parents suffer the grief of having their children taken from them?
As a mother of three, to lose my children for any reason would cause me unimaginable grief; and if they were to be killed by someone who was out partying and got in a car drunk, and without friends, barkeepers or other people who might have known that person was drunk stopping that person from driving, I would be beyond mad, I would be enraged. That’s how MADD started. A mother, Candy Lightner, who lost her 13-year-old daughter to a drunk driver, founded the organization in 1980 and was soon joined by more mothers to fight these terrible and preventable losses.
On Nov. 20 MADD launched a national campaign to eliminate drunk driving completely.
“The real possibility of eliminating drunk driving in this country is a powerful, even audacious, idea. Yet the tools are now at hand. Using technology, tougher enforcement, stronger laws and grassroots mobilization, the goal of eliminating a primary public health threat that has plagued the United States is within our reach,” said Glynn Birch, national president of MADD, whose 21-month-old son was killed by a drunk driver in 1988.
In addition to full implementation of current alcohol ignition interlock technologies, exploration of other advanced vehicle technologies and a mobilized grassroots effort uniting drunk driving victims, families, community leaders and policy makers in the fight to eliminate drunk driving, intensive high-visibility law enforcement is one of the four points in MADD’s national plan.
Eighty percent of the CHP’s force was on patrol during this holiday weekend, and I saw evidence of this as I drove six hours north to my mother’s home in Santa Cruz on Thanksgiving Day, and back home on Sunday. CHP cars were either parked in hiding spots to catch lawbreakers, or seen driving up and down the 101 Freeway from here to Santa Cruz. And enforcement was said to take place around the clock those four days. Drivers noticeably slowed down when a patrol car was spotted. I have never seen that much enforcement on the road during one of my trips north, and I’ve been taking my children to visit grandma for many years.
Definitely, more enforcement helps to at least reduce speeding.
Forty-two people died in four days in California in a driving accident-too many (one life lost in a preventable accident is too many)-but 18 lives were perhaps saved. The CHP will conduct the same type of enforcement periods for the upcoming December holidays.
And while more people tend to drink and drive during the holidays, these tragic accidents caused by driving while under the influence and other reckless behavior occur year round.
Perhaps some might see MADD’s plan to eliminate drunk driving completely as too “audacious” and impossible to achieve, but one more life saved-one more family that doesn’t have to go through the grief and suffering of losing a mother, father, son, daughter, husband wife, or other family member-is worth the effort.