Drinking Alcohol and Driving

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Alcohol and Driving Imagine being in a bar with a few of your good friends. Everyone is drinking and having a good time. Your are going to leave and go home, but you friends won't let you because they know the dangers of driving after having a few drinks. Instead they ca ll a cab to give you a ride home. You would be extremely lucky to have such smart friends. Drunk driving is a very serious problem in our society today, but it is becomming socially unacceptable causing the numbers of alcohol related traffic fatalites t o decline considerably. Drunk driving can be very deadly. Yet many people drive while under the influence everyday. Drivers who are drunk are blamed for the loss of as many as twentyfive thousand lives in highway crashes each year and hundreds of thousands of severe injurys. It is thought that drunk drivers have a long history of doing this and many prior arrests. In addition, most of those killed are just innocent victims whose behavior did not contibute to their deaths. These last two statements are both false. On aver age a drunk driver that kills has never been involved in a alcohol related accident before and have no proir convictions for drunk driving. The part about the people killed are just innocent bistanders is overaggerated also. Most of the drunk drivers v ictims are the drivers themselves, their often passengers, and the drunken pedestrains and cyclists. Despite this drunk driving is still very dangerous. It is the leading cause of unintentional injury deaths in America today. In fact it is said that ab out 40 % of the population will be involved in a alcohol related crash during their life. Drunk driving is especially dangerous to young people, who seem to be more involved than others. Drunk driving is the number one cause of death among young people, accounting for 20% of all deaths from ages 15 to 20. Drunk driving is such a hard thing to overcome though. In our society alcolol is overwhelmingly accepted as a facilitator of sociable interaction, and the great majority of adults drink. But steps a re being taken and the numbers of deaths are declining. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities have been decreasing lately. As a proportion of all traffic fatalities it has been decreased since 1982. In fact since 1982 the number of alcohol releated traffic fatalities has decreased 30%, from 25,165 to 17,699, w hile alcohol-related traffic fatalitites, as a proportion of all traffic fatalities, decreased from 57% to 45%.

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