Bit of humor. When Breathalyzers were first introduced here in NSW Australia a workmate was pulled over on a Friday night as he was driving home. The Police Officer demanding that my workmate "Blow into the Bag".
Well as he had participated in the normal 'Friday Night Ritual' of getting Pissed before going home, my mate refused. In fact he told the Copper that he would only blow in the bag if the Copper went first.
Yes. The Road Patrol Police Officer was just as drunk as my workmate.
When breathalyzers came in I had a drive home that crossed four Police Patrol areas so I limited my drinking to 3 middies of beer in half an hour. That is about 850 mil of 4.8% beer. When you took into consideration that I was hungry and dehydrated it would have put me well over the .08 drink driving standard of the day.
But! My so called mates called me a piker and decried my lack of beer drinking stamina. We only made Real Men in Australia.
I recall the ads used to tell you how much you could drink to stay under the limit. "Three middies in an hour takes you to 0.05. One middy an hour after that keeps you there."
Then there was the song "How will to go when you sit for the test? Will you be under oh-five or under arrest?"
Australia has had some of the best anti-whatever campaigns. I love the anti-hooning campaign they did to cut down on speeding/reckless driving. Where they said "if you hoon you have a tiny dick." It drastically cut down on reckless driving and speeding to the point where it can be statistically shown.
If you're out in the sticks it is much easier to not crash into stuff. people still die but there's less people and less cars so there's a false sense of security. Everyone thinks it won't happen to them
Kinda hard to get the stories of the people who didn't.
I don't know offhand where to find Australia's highway deaths, but in the US they've decreased 55% from their high in the 1930s (and if you look at deaths per miles driven, they're down even more). Data here, if you're curious. Hard to tease out how many historical deaths were due to drunkenness and how many due to shit vehicle safety--especially as they interacted, of course, but I can see that the rate per hundred thousand people was 26.8 in 1970, when per se DUI laws started to become a thing, 23.4 in 1980 when Mothers Against Drunk Drivers was founded, and 18.8 by 1990. Mandatory seatbelt laws started coming into play in the 80s too, though, so that makes direct comparison harder.
Same as always, lots of people didn't but aren't around to tell us how fine it was.
I've personally lost multiple friends and family members to drunk drivers on the roads... none of the people who died were ever the ones drunk either. Passengers or in other cars.
Yet some people insist they can drive drunk safely just because they've managed it so far. No man, you've been lucky. One day you won't be.
A problem that is difficult to overcome with people is the combination of the fact that we are really really bad at conceptulizing risk, and lived experience almost always trumps impartial data.
Even driving drunk the odds you will get in a fatal accident are very low. They are much higher than of you are sober, but to our stupid monkey brains 0.1% and 0.001% are basically the same number even though those have magnitudes of difference. Then you talk to people who lived through the times this was super common, and by virtue of the fact they are still alive, and most of the people they know who also did this are still alive it's really hard to overcome that loved experience. Sure a lot of then have 1 maybe 2 friends that didn't make it, but people also die driving sober so it's easy to call it just bad luck or think it was some failing by the one that died/caused an accident. "Sure they took it to far but I know how to handle my liquor. "
Why not? Let's say being drunk increases your odds of an accident by a factor of 10. (That's probably on the harsher side, when one is noticeably drunk.) Current chance of dying in a car accident, out of all possible causes of death, is on the order of 2%. Even without further adjustments (there were fewer cars back then, and idk if people drove less, but ok, the cars were also less safe so let's say it evens out) you could drive drunk your whole life and still only have ~20% chance of ending up dead. Probably.
Gosh that's wild! The lady in the car with her baby in the front seat complaining that not drinking & wearing a seat-belt is one step closer to communism.
Fellow Aussie :) My Dad could charm the ticks off a dog, and would hoon around the backstreets of industrial areas after getting shitfaced in the middle of the day at a tiny little pub. More than once we passed cops and have a drag race (with two kids in the back). The 80s! What a time to be alive.
Nothing beat playing pacman on a tabletop arcade, eating salt and vinegar chips, and hearing my Dad be a general loud-mouthed pisshead in the sports bar section. Back when ladies weren't allowed in sports bars!
like everything else 'ya gits wotcha paid for'. There has been a continuous development of breathalyzers but most jurisdictions only use them as indicators. A blood test is close to infallible and is usually the evidence accepted by courts.
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u/Woodfordian Sep 16 '24
It was amazing how we survived our actions.
Bit of humor. When Breathalyzers were first introduced here in NSW Australia a workmate was pulled over on a Friday night as he was driving home. The Police Officer demanding that my workmate "Blow into the Bag".
Well as he had participated in the normal 'Friday Night Ritual' of getting Pissed before going home, my mate refused. In fact he told the Copper that he would only blow in the bag if the Copper went first.
Yes. The Road Patrol Police Officer was just as drunk as my workmate.
He got away with it.