THE law around drink-driving is hard to swallow.
And horribly mangled car wrecks, like the one Greater Wellington regional council and the Police are currently towing from school to school, are hard to look at without gulping deeply.  In that car, a 26-year-old Richard Chambers died when he crashed into a tree on Paekakariki Hill while driving drunk.
The people who work for road safety have my deepest respect and always will.  They have waged an unwearying struggle over the past 40 years to address New Zealand’s road carnage.  In the early 70s, we had more than 800 people being killed every year on our roads.  Nowadays it’s down round the 400 mark, which is far lower than even the suicide rate.  Still, it’s a lot of death and a lot of agony in a small society like ours.  Drink-driving has been the big bogey all along.  Last year, 125 of the deaths involved alcohol or drugs. You have to laugh (or cry) when you hear all the recent comments from politicians and consultants about drink-driving.  They’ve missed the obvious.  They’ve swerved over the centre line and rammed their super-charged prejudices into a black hole.  An important concept in recent times is summed up in the slogan “It’s not what we’re drinking, it’s how we’re drinking”.  Although they’ve never explored the rich possibilities of this statement in terms of drinking, I think it could be appropriately adapted with reference to drivers.  I would say, “It’s not what we’re drinking, it the fact we’re even drinking at all (before driving).”
Driving a vehicle is one of the most responsible tasks you will ever fulfil.  It requires knowledge, training, self-discipline, vehicle maintenance, patience, sharp attention, and undying vigilance behind the wheel.  Alcohol undermines all these qualities.  So, if alcohol killed 125 people last year, why do people still drink before getting behind the wheel?  Answer: because they’re allowed to. Who allows them to?  The law does.  Our leaders in the Beehive have ordained that you should not drive if you have more than 400 micrograms of alcohol per litre of your breath. And, in case you don’t fully understand that, you can’t drive with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of your blood.  Two points need to be made here:  1) In practical terms, no one in New Zealand knows what these amounts mean, and 2) alcohol itself affects the ability of drivers to microscopically monitor whatever they individually imagine their grog ‘limit’ is.
In short, instead of threatening to lower the alcohol limit for young drivers, why not do the obvious: absolutely ban any alcohol consumption for any driver of any age? Such a step would take the ‘mystery’ out of how much to drink before driving.  And more of us would see the year out.  I know this asks for a dramatic change of thinking for some, but it’s needed.  It’s not what we’re thinking, it’s how we’re thinking.