Targeting the Social Drinker Is Just MADD

The percentage of traffic fatalities caused by drunk drivers has dropped more than 40% since 1982, and the number of people killed by drunk drivers has leveled off at 16,000 a year. During that period, anti-alcohol advocacy has become something of a niche nonprofit industry. Now, instead of focusing on rounding up real threats to highway safety -- the hard drinkers -- groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have decided to wage war on social drinkers.

In fairness, MADD deserves credit for raising awareness of the dangers of driving while intoxicated. It was almost certainly MADD's dogged efforts to spark public debate that effected the drop in fatalities since 1980, when Candy Lightner founded the group after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver.

But MADD is at heart a bureaucracy, a big one. It boasts an annual budget of $45 million, $12 million of which pays for salaries, pensions and benefits. Bureaucracies don't change easily, even when the problems they were created to address change.

In its eight-point plan to "jump-start the stalled war on drunk driving," MADD advocates the use of highly publicized but random roadblocks to find drivers who have been drinking. Even setting aside the civil liberties implications, these checkpoints do little to get dangerous drunks off the road. Rather, they instill fear in people who have a glass of wine with dinner, a beer at a ballgame or a toast at a retirement party.

In most jurisdictions, even a slight amount of alcohol detected in a Breathalyzer test at such checkpoints can be grounds for arrest for driving under the influence -- a less serious charge than driving while intoxicated but one that still carries social stigma and other consequences.

One point in MADD's plan advocates raising excise taxes on beer. Interestingly, MADD refrains from calling for an added tax on distilled spirits, an industry that the organization has partnered with on various drunk driving awareness projects. And MADD has made no secret of its desire to lower the legal blood- alcohol level from the current .08 in most places to .06, .04 or even to zero. This despite studies showing that most alcohol-caused traffic fatalities involved drivers with a level of 0.14 or higher.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration asserts that fatality rates don't rise appreciably until a driver hits 0.10. Still, MADD champions a threshold of .08 or lower, a standard under which a 120-pound person who had two glasses of wine in two hours would be seen as drunk.