oddly enough, not really.

The argument is that if drunk driving became common (because it was legal) then other drivers and pedestrians would adjust their behavior according to the increased risk.

Based on that, you would expect a spurt of additional deaths early on, as we adjusted to the new risk, and then the numbers would drop again.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me, certainly if I knew that every third driver was drunk, I would behave differently on the roads (ie, would never go near them).

Adjust your behavior to a car flying at you at 80MP/H? Right. And you do realize that drunk drivers don't need any other traffic to park themselves into a tree?

It's the same when gunloon rednecks argue that if it wasn't guns, it would be knifes, all the way down to a paperclip.

It's reasonable. It would be so dangerous to be around traffic that other people would avoid it. Thus deaths might go back down, but note that there's nothing saying that everything else would be normal. It would for example be a lot more inconvenient for those that now stay away from traffic to get around.

These data should not be used to make the claim that attempting to increase safety is useless. Improved vehicle safety features, for example, has been compensated for by faster driving. That means the safety features didn't help lower deaths, but they did help everyone get around faster.

So if we want to make roads safer, we should make people think driving is more dangerous than it really is.

It's counterintuitive - changes in perception of reality are more useful than changes in reality.

> we should make people think driving is more dangerous than it really is

Which is precisely what is being researched and done in various areas, e.g by making the road appear narrower through various visual tricks.

And it works.

Until people learn. I don't mean by that that they necessarily know they're being tricked and consciously "undo" the trick, but they are then trained to handle a tougher constraint, and thus are able to routinely do something they could not before, out of pure training. The whole danger/constraint/learning system is actually very elastic. The net result is that not only they end up driving at the same speed as before in the modified area, they actually drive faster than before in the other non-modified areas.

How does that old chestnut go? "If you want to build the safest car imaginable, put a huge, sharp spike right on the steering wheel"?

People have a desire for mobility, and are very irrational. Danger does not necessarily deter, said I, enjoying my cigar.

Not just behavior - environment too. In a world where drunk driving was common and legal I would expect fences by roads, pedestrian safe tunnels, warning lights, and other such features.

You are making the common mistake of changing a variable in isolation, without taking into account all the things that flow from your change.

That's not really what it says. Presumably Smeed's law does not hold up in the face of dramatic qualitative changes like that - but that doesn't disprove it in a practical sense since driving drunk is illegal in nearly all countries (presumably all that are sampled on that graph?) and isn't likely to become legal.

See my other comment: The legal limits in those countries differ quite substantially, so what's legal in one is not in the other.

One potential analogy: If drunk driving were legal, drunk drivers wouldn't drive as quickly because there is less risk of being pulled over. Driving more slowly with the impaired reaction time is theoretically comparable to driving quickly with normal human reaction time.

Would you drive drunk frequently if this became legal?

"drunk" is a loaded term.

Note that the different countries on that graph also have legal blood alcohol limits differing by factors of at least 4. Yet that is not reflected in the death rates.

While I do not feel safe driving at the U.S. legal limit, I do feel safe driving over the Swedish legal limit (which is 1/4 the U.S. one). While I wouldn't do it in the US, I would in Sweden.