Vermonters regularly cite comparative statistics — political, commercial, social, or educational – to prove their point. The state is at the bottom or top of this category or that. It ranks above the median here and below it there. It’s the best at this and the worst at that. In almost every case, the figures are used to prove someone’s point, or disprove someone else’s.

Here’s one area you don’t hear much about, perhaps because there seems to be no organized constituency that will benefit from the discussion:

Compared to other states, Vermonters drink and drive a lot.

So they get into alcohol-caused accidents more than the residents of most other states, and are more likely to be killed as a result.

In 2006, according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice) , 17,961 people were arrested in Vermont. In 6,149 of them, or 34.2 percent, alcohol was involved, and most of those alcohol-related arrests, 4,148,  were for drunk driving.

In only four states -North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire — was the percentage of alcohol-related arrests higher. Vermont and Wyoming were tied.

That statistic suggests but does not prove that  Vermont has a high proportion of drunk driving and drunk driving fatalities. But the suggestion was enhanced by figures provided by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s  National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA), in turn an office of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

According to those figures, said Janie Bryan Loveless, the  Communications Director for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in Dallas, Vermont is “thirty-second in terms of fatalities,” meaning only 18 states have a greater proportion of drunk driving fatalities.

“You’re not doing real well,” she said.

As further evidence, she noted that according to FARS,  6,069 Vermont motorists “who have had three or more  (drunk driving convictions) are still driving, and  833 are driving even though they’ve had five convictions.”

That’s a lot in a small state. One likely reason for Vermont’s relatively poor drunk driving record is that it has relatively weak drunk driving laws. Frank Harris of MADD’s policy department said Vermont is “one of 3 states that has no ignition interlock law.” The other two are Alabama and South Dakota.

Those laws either require motorists convicted of drunk driving to install  an ignition interlock device in his or her vehicle, or empower a judge to order such installation. The driver blows into the device, which measures the driver’s blood alcohol content. If the driver has been drinking, the ignition interlock won’t let the vehicle start.

Harris acknowledged that ignition interlocks are not infallible. The driver can use another vehicle (though he said in some states judges are authorized to require them for all cars in the driver’s household), and some drivers have had friends blow into the device. The newer versions, he said, come equipped with cameras “to make sure you’re the one blowing into it.”

But he said MADD was convinced it was the single most effective method for reducing drunk driving and the injuries and deaths it causes. The first state to use the system, he said, was New Mexico, which used to have one of the worst drunk driving records in the country. Since the ignition interlock has been in use, he said, “DUI (Driving Under the Influence) recidivism has dropped, and drunk driving  deaths also.”

In the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice statistics, 20 percent of New Mexico’s arrests in 2006 involved alcohol.

This year, Sens. Vincent Illuzzi , a Republican from Newport and Richard Sears, a Democrat from North Bennington, introduced legislation establishing an ignition interlock procedure for Vermont. It went to the Senate Transportation Committee and died there.

Not that the Legislature did nothing to discourage drinking, and therefore drunk driving. It did one thing. In the budget it passed last week over Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto, the Legislature  raised the tax on alcoholic beverages. The goal here was to raise money, not to save lives, but it might do a bit of both.

Probably not much, though. According to several economic studies, raising the tax of alcohol cuts alcohol consumption. It would seem likely, then, to reduce drunk driving. The problem is that booze is cheap. Or, as a study more formally put it, “Alcoholic beverage prices have declined relative to the prices of other goods and services for the past 50 years.”

That’s because, said this study, taxes have been kept low by state and federal governments. That’s because (not according to the study, but it’s true anyway) the alcoholic beverage business is a powerful lobby in Congress and in every state government. The end result (back to the study) is that “this decline in real prices has kept alcohol consumption and many of the problems associated with alcohol use and abuse at levels higher than they would otherwise be.”

Besides, the drunk driver is more likely to be the problem, addicted, drinker, who will fork up the extra dough to pay for his or her booze even if the tax goes up.

Another, slightly whimsical but not entirely frivolous proposal comes from Nate Silver of the web site “538.” The problem, Silver said, is not that some people drink, but that a few drinkers engage in “particularly stupid sorts of behaviors while doing so.”

Some medical evidence indicates that “moderate alcohol consumption is in fact associated with improved health outcomes,”  he said, and  a “person who has a couple of drinks a couple of days a week, and who never drives or has the compulsion to engage in violence while doing so, imposes virtually no negative consequences either on himself or on society. Drinking doesn’t cause negative externalities in the same way that, say, driving (traffic congestion and pollution) or smoking (second-hand smoke) intrinsically do.”

So instead of raising the tax on alcohol, he said, how about raising the fines for drunk driving. Really raising them. To $8,000 per offense.

Whoa! That’s a lot of money. But Silver said he didn’t pick it out of the air. It is, he said, what a study co-authored by Steve Levitt, co- author of the best-selling, Freakonomics, determined would be the amount ” required to internalize the negative externalities associated with driving drunk.”

Silver proposed this as a possible federal law. It is no more likely to be seriously entertained by Congress than it is by the Vermont State Legislature, which means not likely at all.

Still, an interesting idea to ponder of a summer evening, perhaps to be discussed with interested and interesting friends while sharing an interesting libation.

Make sure there’s a designated driver.

Tags: Drunk driving

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Business & Economy, The Legislature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.