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The 0.08 BAC limit also has no basis in reality for what impairment is. It's a political reality, not a scientific one. MADD and other organizations lobbied to make this a legal limit across the US and many other jurisdictions around the world followed suit.

That's not to say that anyone should drive after drinking, but the basic reality is that impairment is often individual, and cannot be directly measured by blood alcohol content. Many people are impaired with a lower BAC than 0.08, and in many states you can now be charged and convicted of DUI even if your BAC is not beyond the legal threshold on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence.

There's no good answer here, because we need cut and dried evidence in our legal system to prevent abuses, but there's not really good ways to do that. Separately, the leading cause of accidents is no longer drunk driving in most parts of the West, it's inattentive driving due to cellphone/electronics usage while operating a vehicle. Younger generations don't drink as much as older generations, to the point that zero-percent alcohol spirits and NA beer are now becoming broad markets and it's dramatically affecting bar/pub culture, but younger generations nearly as a rule are addicted to their smartphones.

by iso16314 hours ago|

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MADD was formed in 1980

0.08 level was set in law in the UK in 1967, in France and West Germany in 1970

Most countries have since lowered it to 0.05.

by tristor2 hours ago|

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> Most countries have since lowered it to 0.05.

That's the BAC of a healthy male an hour after drinking 2 light beers. That is an absurd limit to set in stone, however there is plenty of evidence to show that /some/ people are impaired at 0.05 BAC.

Ultimately it really amounts to a battle between people who want to operate off fuzzy logic and reasonableness and a people who want to use totalitarian enforcement. There is definitely a significant government-funded (and activist pushed) take where /any/ amount of alcohol /any/ time prior to driving is dangerous, which is obviously stupid and incorrect.

People should not drink and drive, they should not drive while impaired in any capacity, whether its from their prescription medication, a drink, a joint, or simply a lack of sleep. There is also absolutely nothing wrong for a normal healthy person to have a single glass of wine over a steak dinner and to drive home, which will not in any way physiologically impair you.

by vkou18 minutes ago|

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> There is definitely a significant government-funded (and activist pushed) take where /any/ amount of alcohol /any/ time prior to driving is dangerous, which is obviously stupid and incorrect.

Driving itself is dangerous. Acknowledging this is obviously smart and correct.

And while I'm sure that you can drive safely at 100 miles an hour, or after five beers, some objective standard has to be drawn somewhere. If the line were drawn at 0.16, someone would no doubt chime in to explain about how they've got it fully together at 0.17.

by tristor3 minutes ago|

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Sure, but that's a strawman of my position. I'm not saying we should not draw a line, I'm saying that drawing a line is required due to how our systems work (in my earlier comment), and then in my reply to /reducing that line which was already nebulous/ I'm pointing out how ridiculous that reduction is. There are people who are impaired at 0.05 BAC. A normal healthy adult male is not. Like many things you can think of them as statistical distributions with outliers. If you slide the BAC level you consider legally impaired (regardless of actual function) you shift how many people will fall in the distribution above the line but without meaningful impairment.

I'm not making some radical point here, I'm speaking basic reality.