Of course, there are indeed other solutions that should be studied if they have a chance of reducing harm & death initiated by the act of driving under an influence.
I wonder about that.
We always hear the trope about the drunk driver usually not dying because they're "relaxed," but being relaxed isn't going to do jack when you smash into an overpass at highway speeds or dump your car over a cliff.
Keep telling everyone that drunk driving is dangerous and they're easily going to infer that it's dangerous for themselves. And then which is more of a deterrent, a nasty fine, or death?
They are notoriously bad at executive function generally; deterrents aren't aimed at them.
The deterrent effect of DUI laws isn't on drunk people, it's on people who would otherwise choose to drink when they would then have to drive.
[1] https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/drunk-driv...
I'm sorta one, and I'll be the first to say that the newsroom is not a place for activism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the...
TLDR: British Columbia implemented the toughest anti-drunk-driving laws in Canada. Automobile accident rates dropped 20%. Pretty damn effective.
I do think that one study that shows a robust correlation is a good start, though. That would be the starting point for trying to decide what the optimal tradeoff is.
The thing is though, I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. I bet if you made the penalty for drunk driving death it would reduce drunk driving further, but I don't think many would agree that is a measured and reasonable response to the offense.
Here, take a look at the pretty pictures and tell me again that the results of the new laws are just a result of news media hype: a decade later and DD fatalities still down more than 50%.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/driving-and-transportation...
TLDR: lowering the acceptable BAC level and putting some teeth behind the law radically and permanently changed the DD accident rates in BC. Gosh, such a surprise, that.
People so consistently ignore it or get it wrong that people have to bring it out time and again. For example:
> a decade later and DD fatalities still down more than 50%.
We're trying to distinguish between the effect of the law and the effect of hearing about the dangers.
If the law is still actively being publicized, presumably so are the dangers, so that doesn't work.
If nobody has heard a word about the law in ten years but people remember hearing about the law ten years ago then they also remember being warned about the dangers ten years ago. Maybe once people change their behavior it sticks.
If people don't remember things they heard ten years ago then they don't remember that the law exists either and it can't be deterring anything.
If you really want to do the experiment, repeal the law but keep publicizing the dangers and see if the rate goes back up.
Also the way you use correlation isn't causation is disengenous. By your usage apples falling down is correlation not causation. The whole point about that statement is that we should not infer causation if we don't have a good understanding of why the causal relationship exists. In this case we do.
Pull the other one, it has bells on.
Something explains why the law was passed in 2010 and not 30-odd years before. How do you know the same thing that caused legislative action isn't the same thing that caused the behavior change?