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DRUNK DRIVING

  • There were 11,773 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities in 2008, a decline of 9.7 percent from 2007.[1]
  • Nearly 1.4 million driving-while-impaired (DWI) arrests occur in the United States each year.[2]
  • In 2006, an estimated 278,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes where police reported that alcohol was present, a 9 percent increase over 2005.[3]
  • In 2007, there were 12,998 alcohol-related crash fatalities (32 percent of all crash fatalities)  involving a driver with a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of .08 or greater.[4]
  • The most frequently recorded BAC level in 2007 for alcohol-impaired drivers and motorcyclists involved in fatal crashes was .16, more than twice the legal limit in all states and the District of Columbia.[5]
  • In 2007, 15 percent of children 14 and younger who were killed in crashes were killed in alcohol-related crashes. More than half of these were passengers in the vehicle of an alcohol-impaired driver.[6]
  • In 2008, 10 million persons ages 12 or older (or 4 percent of this age group) reported driving under the influence of an illicit drug in the past year. Among young adults ages 18 to 25, the rate was 12 percent.[7]
  • In 2008, 30.9 million persons ages 12 or older, or 12 percent, reported driving under the influence of alcohol at least once in the past year. This percentage has dropped slightly since 2002, when the rate was 14 percent.[8]
  • Driving under the influence of alcohol was related to age, with the rate increasing from 7 percent for 16- and 17-year-olds to a peak of 26 percent for 21- to 25-year-olds, then steadily declining for older ages to a low of 2 percent for persons ages 65 and higher.[9]
  • Juvenile arrests for driving under the influence increased by 33 percent from 1994 to 2003.  The increase for female juveniles was 83 percent, and the increase for male juveniles was 25 percent. During the same period, arrests of adults for driving under the influence decreased by six percent.[10]
  • In 2006, more than 13 percent of high school seniors admitted to driving under the influence of marijuana in the two weeks prior to the survey.[11]
  • In 2008, there were 276 boating accidents and 124 deaths in which alcohol was a contributing factor. Alcohol use was the leading factor contributing to boating deaths.[12]
  • Operating a boat with a BAC level greater than .1 increases the risk of death during a boating accident more than ten times compared to a BAC of zero.[13]
  • During the Christmas and New Year holiday time, about 40 percent of all traffic fatalities occur in crashes where at least one of the drivers has a BAC level of .08 or more. During the remainder of December, the figure is 28 percent.[14]
  • In a 2007 survey, 29 percent of high school students said that within the past 30 days they had ridden in a vehicle with a driver who had been drinking. In the same survey, 11 percent of high school students reported that they had driven a vehicle when they had been drinking.[15]
  • A study of repeat impaired-driving offenders found that the majority of respondents (54 percent) were alcohol-dependent.  In addition, many of the respondents had at least one lifetime disorder in addition to alcohol abuse or dependence.  Among those, the most prevalent was major depressive or dysthymic disorder (31 percent), followed by posttraumatic stress disorder (15 percent).[16]
  • From 1982 to 2002, an estimated 66 percent of fatal crashes on Indian reservations were alcohol-related, compared to 47 percent nationally for the same period.[17]
  • In 2000, each fatal alcohol-related crash cost $1.1 million. The total cost of all alcohol-related crashes was $51 billion.[18]

 

[1] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "2008 Traffic Safety Annual Assessment-Highlights," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), Table 3, http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811172.pdf (accessed August 26, 2009).

[2] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Traffic Safety Facts: Blood Alcohol Concentration Test Refusal Laws," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2008), 1, http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles//DOT/NHTSA/Communication%20&%20Consumer%20Information/Articles/Associated%20Files/810884.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[3] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Fatality Counts and Estimates of People Injured for 2006," 79, (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2007), http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810837.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[4] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Traffic Safety Facts: Alcohol Impaired Driving," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), 1, http://www.dmv.state.ne.us/highwaysafety/pdf/TSFAlcohol2007.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[5] Ibid., 5.

[6] Ibid., 2.

[7] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies, "Results from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings," (Rockville, MD: SAMHSA, 2009), 29, http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k8nsduh/2k8Results.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[8] Ibid., 37.

[9] Ibid., 38.

[10] Howard N. Snyder, "Juvenile Arrests 2003," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2005), 10, http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/209735.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[11] Patrick M. O'Malley and Lloyd D. Johnston, "Drugs and Driving by American High School Seniors, 2001-2006," Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 68, no. 6 (2007): 834-42.

[12] U.S. Coast Guard, "2008 Boating Statistics," (Washington, DC: U.S. Coast Guard, 2009), 7 http://www.uscgboating.org/assets/1/Publications/Boating_Statistics_2008.pdf (accessed November 2, 2009).

[13] U.S. Coast Guard, "Boating Under the Influence, Alcohol Effects," (Washington, DC: U.S. Coast Guard, 2005), http://www.uscgboating.org/safety/boating_under_the_influence_initiatives.aspx (accessed Novemeber 2, 2009).

[14] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Traffic Safety Facts: Crash Stats: Fatalities Related to Impaired Driving during the Christmas and New Year's Day Holiday Periods," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2007), http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810870.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[15] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance-United States, 2007," (Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008), 5, http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs/pdf/yrbss07_mmwr.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[16] Janet Lapham, Garnett McMillan, and Jodi Lapidus, "Psychiatric Disorders in a Sample of Repeat Impaired-Driving Offenders," Journal of Studies on Alcohol 67 (2006): 707.

[17] National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, "Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes on Indian Reservations," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2004), 17, http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809727.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).

[18] Lawrence J. Blincoe et al., "The Economic Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes 2000," (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002), 40-41, http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/Communication%20&%20Consumer%20Information/Articles/Associated%20Files/EconomicImpact2000.pdf (accessed September 21, 2009).
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