OCR Text |
Show Drunks may be funny, but drunk driving is no joke By Michaelene Pendleton Drunks are funny. At least they are on TV and in- the movies. Dean Martin and Foster Brooks make a good living proving prov-ing how funny drunks are. Lee Marvin even had an alcoholic horse. Drunks say hilarious things, roll their eyes a lot, and fall over. The one thing they don't do in funny movies' is drive. Drunk driving isn't funny. In 1946, alcohol was involved in 18 of all . traffic fatalities. In 1978, more than 50 of all traffic fatalities involved drunk driving. Nationally, that's almost 30,000 people; peo-ple; in Utah, that's almost 200 people. One-half of Moab's Adult Probation " and Parole office's case load consists of DUI offenders. In the United States, more than $10 billion per year are spent in tending injured, burying bury-ing dead, and repairing vehicles. The drinking driver adds $240 per year to your cost of living. It's hard to put a dollar amount on the cost of human life. In the past several years, a lot of attention has been given to the rising crime rate, yet the annual drunk driver kill-rate kill-rate is more than twice the murder rate. The legal definition is automobile homicide but the victim is just as dead as if it were called murder. Automobile manufacturers manufac-turers and the government govern-ment are taking action to make cars safer, including the 55 m.p.h. speed limit, but most traffic deaths occur at the hands of drunk drivers driving below be-low the legal speed limit. So if safer cars and lower speed limits aren't the answer, what is? The answer is to teach people not to drive when they are drunk. "If you drink, don't drive" is still the only method that works. Since alcohol impairs judgement, how do you know if you're too drunk to drive? In Utah, the upper limit of blood alcohol content (BAC) is .08 - at that point a driver is legally considered consider-ed drunk. From .05 to .08, a person may be considered impaired, so a good rule of the thumb if T I-., i you're driving is tain a BAC of leSq tvT .05. 633 thU,- Considering one drint' to be one ounce of 86 proo liquor, 4 Ounces of wine or 12 ounces of beer takei on an empty stomach i you weigh 120 pounds' o less, you could have on, drink every 2 hours ani probably be a safe driver If you weigh between 12i and 200 pounds, you coul, have two drinks in hours. If you weigh ove ' 200 pounds, you coul,'V have three drinks in (' hours. More than that ani not only might you b legally impaired but yoi probably aren't a saf, driver. If you have had tor" much to drink, how do yovs o! get sober enough to drive ' jm8 Black coffee and coking showers don't make f person sober; they onl make a wide-awak m drunk. In general, it take) C one hour per ounce d L alcohol for all the physica effects to leave yourbody; nui |