This study compared the driving records of 106,214 persons arrested for drug offenses in 1989 with 41,493 drivers from the general driving population. The drug arrestees were categorized according to the six summary offense classes used by the California Department of Justice, which were felony narcotics, marijuana, dangerous drugs, and other drugs, and misdemeanor marijuana and other drugs. Timeframes studied were 1-year pre-arrest, 1-year post-arrest, and 2-years post-arrest. Each drug arrestee group had significantly more traffic violations and total accidents than the control group, except for 2-year post-arrest accidents for the felony narcotics group. Measures of accident culpability revealed that drug arrestees were more apt to be responsible for the accidents in which they were involved than was the general driving population. Individuals arrested for drug offenses clearly pose an elevated traffic safety risk.
This article is an update of earlier surveys of the functioning of methadone-maintained individuals, and includes laboratory tests of cognition, perceptual and motor functioning, reaction-time, and attentional functioning, as well as performance in simulated driving situations. Field studies include epidemiological studies of automobile driving behavior and employability studies. The authors conclude that methadone maintenance treatment, when appropriately administered, does not impair functional capacity. Methadone patients can successfully perform tasks for which they are qualified.
Modern drunk driving laws strongly depend on blood alcohol content (BAC) evidence obtained from breath tests, but nearly one in five persons requested by police to take a breath test refuses. This study conducted in Minnesota examines the causes and consequences of such refusal. The causes seem to lie in confusion and incompetence of the impaired driver, rational calculation of the costs and benefits of refusal, and general or situational hostility of the suspect. Consequences of refusal include a lower likelihood of conviction, especially of an alcohol-related offense. Minnesota's law criminalizing certain refusals has resulted in a slightly lower refusal rate and an increase in the rate of conviction for an alcohol-related offense.
Sobriety checkpoints are a deterrent to alcohol-impaired driving if they are conducted often. For a sobriety checkpoint to be an effective deterrent, though, the police officers must be reasonably competent in identifying the alcohol-impaired drivers passing through it. Officers have limited time and few cues on which to make judgments about impairment. This study examines the use of passive alcohol sensors by police officers as a screening device to provide an objective indication of alcohol in the driver's breath. Police officers using standard checkpoint procedures identified 26 percent of drivers with blood alcohol concentrations between 0.05 percent and <0.10 percent and 55 percent of drivers with blood alcohol concentrations of 0.10 percent or higher. Officers using the passive alcohol sensors had detection rates of 39 percent and 71 percent, respectively.
The Victim Impact Panel (VIP) is a group of three or four speakers who were seriously injured or whose loved one was killed in a driving while intoxicated (DWI) crash. VIPs present personal stories to DWI offenders with the primary goal of reducing DWI recidivism. This study compares the pre-panel DWI rates with the post-panel recidivism rates of over 2,000 DWI offenders who attended VIPs in Oregon and California. The same rates are compared to the rates of age-sex matched control groups of drivers. The control subjects were convicted of DWI in the same states at the same time period, but were not ordered to attend the VIP. Data for 683 no-shows were also studied. The results reveal that, although in Oregon the VIP attendees had a lower rate of recidivism than their matched control group, the recidivism rate of attendees was not different than that of the no-shows or the age-sex matched control group for the no-shows. In California, no differences were observed in recidivism rates between the VIP group and either the no-show group or the two control groups. VIPs may be a more effective tool for more mature offenders (those 35+ years old). Explanations on the lack of effectiveness of the VIP and suggestions for improvement of the process are offered.
This literature survey reviews the effects of alcohol on human behavior and performance, especially low alcohol dose effects. This review consisted of 155 empirical studies dating from 1985 to mid-1993, using the alcohol effect schema of Kruger. Several general conclusions that were largely in agreement with previous reviews on this topic were reached. First, sensitivity to the subjective intoxicating effects of alcohol was greater than that for all other performance classes and appeared to display a threshold with respect to blood alcohol concentration (BAC), rather than the linear relation evident in performance data. Second, sensitivity to performance impairment in controlled performance and simulator tasks was greater than that for psychophysical function or automatic performance. Finally, a variety of task-, subject-, and environmental-characteristics or conditions were found to mediate the magnitude and sensitivity to alcohol effects, particularly at lower doses. This review concluded that since alcohol sensitivity can vary from time to time, person to person, and situation to situation, the setting of a safe BAC will always be arbitrary, being based on a low, but non-zero, incidence of effects below that level.
This conference presentation discusses the effectiveness of an enforcement-oriented public information and education (PIE) program for new blood alcohol content (BAC) laws aimed at teenagers in Maryland. The program, which included 5 television public service announcements, 4 radio public service announcements, a poster, and a single-fold pamphlet, greatly reduced HBD (have been drinking) crashes and greatly improved the knowledge of the law.
Youthful age is a major personal characteristic associated with increased crash risk. The crash rates of young drivers are markedly higher than those of other age groups, including the elderly. Immaturity manifested by risky behavior and driving inexperience are thought to be the primary reasons for the heightened crash risk of youthful drivers. In addition, young drivers are particularly susceptible to impairment by alcohol. Measures that delay licensure and that result in initial driving experience being accumulated in lower risk settings can reduce the problem, along with measures that reduce the availability of alcohol or otherwise discourage alcohol use.
This paper describes the limitations of quasi-experimental evaluation procedures frequently used in assessing driving under the influence (DUI) educational and remediation treatment programs. Although conventional designs for removing bias can be flawed, examples are cited in which relatively unequivocal inferences can be reached in terms of the presence or absence of a positive treatment effect. In general, it is believed that randomized experimental designs are superior to quasi-experiments and should be used much more extensively than has been the case.
In this conference presentation, a model is described that the authors developed to help summarize the current state of knowledge about reducing injuries related to impaired driving and to help promote discussions of where we need to go in this area. The presentation concludes with descriptions of studies that evaluate specific alcohol-control policies.
The purpose of this work is to define the role of the intake of drugs, drugs of abuse, and alcohol in determining the disability to drive, aiming at correlating and combining findings from epidemiological studies examining the incidence of drugs in various subpopulations of road users with results from a review of the recent literature on psychomotor performance and drugs. Analysis of the literature was carried out by processing and classifying the data, to extrapolate and assess results reported in empirical works. Classifications and conclusions consider studies on the interaction between drugs or drugs of abuse and alcohol. The problem of pharmacological interaction is presented after preliminary examination of the general mechanisms of action of the drugs and the best-known types of interaction among classes of psychoactive substances. Lastly, the problems of methodology and content that emerged during the review are addressed.
This conference presentation discusses Project Northland, a community intervention trial funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism from 1990 to 1995. The project is being conducted by the University of Minnesota and involves multiple faculty, professional staff, and doctoral students in the Division of Epidemiology, as well as eight coordinators who lived in the intervention communities in Northeastern Minnesota. The study objectives are to delay or prevent onset of alcohol use among young adolescents in grades 6 through 9, or ages 12 to 15, and to reduce the overall amount of use.
This paper explains how mass communication is being used in a comprehensive community prevention trial in two communities in California and one in South Carolina to reduce alcohol-involved traffic injuries and deaths. The community prevention trial described here employs five intervention strategies: 1) mass communication and community mobilization; 2) drinking and driving enforcement; 3) responsible beverage service at bars and restaurants; 4) underage drinking reduction; and 5) limitation of access to alcohol to reduce high-risk drinking. The synergy of the five components is being tested, that is, how and in what ways do the intervention strategies reinforce each other? Mass communication plays an important role in the intervention strategies. First, the news media are used to increase public awareness of alcohol-involved trauma and public support of alcohol prevention policies. An example of such a policy is stricter driving under the influence (DUI) enforcement. Second, mass communication is used to increase the public's perceived risk of detection and arrest for drinking and driving. Third, mass communication is also used to increase community support of law enforcement activities, especially high profile DUI checkpoints and use of passive blood alcohol content sensors.
This conference presentation examines the deterrent effect of driving while intoxicated (DWI) educational programs on DWI recidivism. DWI education programs have as their objective a reduction of drinking and driving events. They are predicated on the notion that people are arrested for DWI because they don't know any better and that given the appropriate information, they would make better choices. Education programs are not treatment programs. They focus on first-time offenders. The educational curriculum in these programs usually includes information on why people drink and drive, on the effects of alcohol, on the consequences of drinking and driving, and on how to avoid repeat DWIs. In a few areas, the complexity of driving skills is addressed. Several studies which have evaluated DWI education programs are discussed, followed by a discussion of future trends in these programs. In conclusion, it is pointed out that, within DWI educational programs, we have really done very little to explore and fully examine the effectiveness of the variety of options available.
This paper presents some thoughts about implementation of alcohol-impaired driving prevention and education programs and strategies. Many driving under the influence (DUI) prevention activities lie in common ground between the highway safety and the health and medical communities. Many effective DUI prevention programs are best implemented as collaborative strategies between these communities.
The correlates of driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol or other drugs were examined in a sample of 2,037 tenth and twelfth grade students in a large midwestern city. Thirteen percent reported that they had driven under the influence in the last month and 31 percent reported having been a passenger with someone who was DUI in the last month. Males were slightly more likely than females to drive under the influence and females were more likely than males to be with drinking drivers. Demographic, personality, and social variables were related to DUI behavior and exposure to DUI by others. Results suggest that programs targeted at correcting beliefs about the positive consequences of alcohol use, changing norms in relation to drinking and driving and alcohol use, and teaching skills to refuse and intervene when exposed to drinking drivers may prevent DUI behavior. Preliminary results of the effects of a social influences drug prevention program on self-reports of DUI behavior and traffic casualty statistics are described.
In August 1988, a mandatory license plate impoundment law took effect that required driving while intoxicated (DWI) violators arrested for a third time to relinquish all license plates for impoundment and destruction. Initially, the law was administered through the court system. The law was amended in December 1990 to parallel the state's per se law in which the arresting officer issues the impoundment order at the time of arrest. Survival analysis is used to compare recidivism of violators in three treatment and two comparison groups. No evidence exists that the judge's impoundment order (during the court phase) had any significant impact on violator recidivism. However, violators who received impoundment orders after the law became administrative recidivated less frequently than those who did not, suggesting that license plate impoundment is a practical countermeasure in helping to reduce the impaired-driver problem.
This conference paper reviews the early history of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the early social and legal context during which it came into being, and early research on MADD and its expectations. Attention is then focused on MADD's Rating the States assessment in 1991, which was followed by the second one in November 1993. Included are how the rating program was conducted, the rating methodology, and its results.
To reduce the involvement of young drivers in alcohol-related crashes, 29 States and the District of Columbia have established lower legal blood alcohol limits for drivers younger than age 21 than for adult drivers. Of these, 12 lowered the legal limit for young people prior to 1991. To assess the impact, these 12 States were paired for comparison with 12 nearby States matched for legal drinking age and timing of changes in that law. Among drivers ages 15-20, fatal crashes involving a single vehicle at night are three times more likely than other fatal crashes to be alcohol-related. Whether the proportion of fatal crashes that involved single vehicles at night declined more among young drivers targeted by lower blood alcohol limits than among young drivers of the same age in comparison States was examined. The maximum available equal number of pre- and post-law years were compared in each pair of States. During the post-law period, the proportion of fatal crashes that involved single vehicles at night declined 16 percent among young drivers targeted by lower blood alcohol laws, whereas it rose 1 percent among drivers of the same age in comparison States where blood alcohol limits were not changed (P < .001). Among adults, the proportion of fatal nocturnal crashes that involved single vehicles declined 5 percent in the group of States with the lowered levels for young people during the period after the law was enacted and 6 percent in the group of neighboring comparison States. The proportion of fatal crashes that involved single vehicles at night declined 22 percent among drivers in States with .00 percent limits, whereas it declined only 2 percent among drivers of the same age in comparison States (P <.003). Among those targeted by .02 percent BAL limits, the proportion of fatal crashes that involved single vehicles at night declined 17 percent. It rose 4 percent in comparison States(P = .005). No significant difference appeared between States that lowered blood alcohol levels to the range of .04-.06 percent relative to comparison States.If all States adopted .00 or .02 percent limits for drivers ages 15-20, at least 375 fatal single vehicle crashes at night would be prevented each year.
Benzodiazepines (BZDs)--commonly prescribed drugs for insomnia and anxiety--may increase accident risks in traffic without a definitive concentration-effect relationship. Alcohol, however, increases accident proneness concentration dependently. This survey analyzes the concentration-effect relationship of these agents in field conditions in terms of performance on the clinical test for drunkenness (CTD), which is a set of motor, vestibular, mental, and behavioral subtests developed in Finland to examine drunken drivers. Currently, the CTD is used only when drivers are suspected of driving under the influence of drugs other than alcohol. To understand drug effects on CTD performance, blood and urine samples of a total of 1,069 Finnish drivers were analyzed for BZDs and alcohol. Final analysis involved 327 cases. Impairments on the CTD correlated significantly both to blood alcohol concentration and to blood BZD concentration. The results verify the sensitivity of the CTD in revealing alcohol-induced impairments of psychomotor performance, and also reveal a clear concentration-response relationship between CTD performance and blood BZD concentrations.
