A recent article written by a mothers against drunk driving (MADD) president, Jan Withers, speaks about the pending litigation revolving around lowering the legal BAC limit from 0.08% to 0.05%. Ms. Withers spoke about how she is the mother of a 15-year-old daughter who was the victim of a drunk driving accident, and that she was extremely proud to be presen
t with President Bill Clinton when he signed into law a national 0.08 blood alcohol limit. This was an initiative that took MADD and other advocate groups over 20 years to accomplish.
However, the long-time advocate writes in her recent article, Other Measures Are, Just As Important,” that “singling out a lower blood alcohol level is not enough; we must focus on other initiatives too.” This begs the question as to whether MADD thinks this initiative is too far; or, whether it stands in the way of other initiatives MADD has been attempting to set in place. For example, Ms. Withers has stated that the National Transportation Safety Board is concerned that drunk driving represents roughly one third of all highway deaths, and they have released a package of recommendations to lower drinking fatalities that MADD apparently stands behind.
The program MADD supports is the Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving that supports high visibility enforcement, ignition interlocks for all convicted drunk drivers with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 and higher, and development of alcohol detection systems which could help to prevent drunk drivers from operating vehicles. MADD states that in the seventeen states that have enacted ignition interlock laws, DUI fatalities have greatly decreased by as much as 30 percent.
Therefore, MADD has not stated that they will stand behind the 0.05 BAC law, which they claim simply singles out the lowering of the current BAC level. The organization states that they are going to concentrate on measures such as the Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving implemented by the National Highway Safety Board concentrating on alcohol detection systems.
