Severity of Problems with Drunk Driving and Ways to Solve Them: Analytical Essay

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Every year loads of teens across America receive their license to drive and join the thousands of other people already traveling the roads. For teens, it is necessary that they understand the importance of driving safely as it is a huge responsibility that they are being trusted with. In order to ensure that teens are properly trained on how to handle themselves on the road, all teens have to go through some type of program, be it online classes, or a traditional classroom setting, before being allowed to legally drive a vehicle. Most of these new students learning how to drive are teens so the main goal for this program is to help teeangers from 15 to 22. With that in mind, teens need to take these classes seriously and learn about the right way to drive to make sure they understand all the laws involved with driving. Not only do they need to know that important information, but they also need to be wary of the dangers of driving. According to studies conducted by Driver Knowledge, there are an average of six million car accidents a year, a good amount of them involving drivers who were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the collision. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “every day, 29 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver.” (CDC). Information like this brings to light the severity of problems like drunk driving out in the open and gets everyone looking. It has become more and more of an issue lately in the recent years, and with newer drivers joining the road each year, there comes a point where there needs to be a whole new look at how to solve these accidents caused by driving under the influence. The big solution this will be over is to help decrease the number of drunk driving collisions by increasing awareness through mandating drunk driving to be included in driver’s ed courses.

Context

There have been many different attempts at solving the issue with drunk driving. For example, the American Public Health Association had brought up the introduction of “[reducing] the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit from 0.08 to 0.05.” (AJPH). They thought this would be a good solution “We concluded that BAC 0.05 laws are not only ethically defensible but desirable. States and Congress should work to promote them.” Yet the only problem that occurred with this solution was there seemed to be a restriction to liberty in their article: “Critics objected to these laws because they restrict individual liberty and fail to consider that individuals value social drinking.”(AJPH). When adding more restrictions to something that is never planned to be bad surely makes it seem the people of America have less freedom in simple things. Instead, the most logical solution of addressing the problem would to make it part of a new program, or add it to the already existing programs for driver’s education courses. By increasing awareness on the severity of the problem before the person even enters a vehicle, the number of damage drunk driving accidents occur each year will eventually become lower.

Another solution that was implemented was from the National Highway Traffic Safety Admissions where they applied ignition interlock requirements in 18 states and 32 did not require it. From the results they found some interesting information. “The adjusted rate of alcohol-involved crash deaths was 4.7 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.0, 5.4) per 100 000 in states with the universal interlock requirement, compared with 5.5 (95% CI = 5.48, 5.53) in states without, an absolute reduction of 0.8 (95% CI = 0.1, 1.5) deaths per 100 000 per year.” (AJPH) This all came to an interesting solution that it did help stop drunk driving but only a small percent was changed so this solution could still be implemented to the whole nation but will never be a big impact to stopping drunk driving.

Not only is there information about ways people have researched on finding solutions but researchers have found that some teens are now adding alcohol to energy drinks and making it worse when they are in a car and sometimes not even the driver. In an article in the journal “Substance Use & Misuse” called “High-Risk Driving Behaviors Among 12th Grade Students: Differences Between Alcohol-Only and Alcohol Mixed With Energy Drink Users” they did a study to find out teenagers in 12th grade that engaged AmED-use, which is alcohol mixed with energy drinks, and students that only used alcohol and found some interesting research, “12th grade AmED users were significantly more likely to be in a motor vehicle accident (p

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