Drunk driving is a huge one.

Meanwhile CDC hasn’t been able to create actual evidence that driving while high causes more accidents. https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/health-effects/driving.html

I’m not saying it doesn’t but alcohol causes so many unnecessary deaths in society due to drunk driving. Note: I’m not advocating for alcohol to be banned.

Phone use while driving probably eclipses any other risk factor these days:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-03-14/deaths-bro...

But I bet it would be very politically unpopular to address phone use while driving.

It isn't. My state is looking into making the penalties stronger and people are generally favorable for that because they still see people driving every day with their face glued to their phone.

The only people against distracted driving penalties are people who are entitled and think they should be able to put others in danger for their minor convenience or libertarian assholes who think seatbelt laws are oppressive nanny stating.

Selective enforcement and high penalties is not a solution. Simply enforcing existing laws would be trivial and solve the issue. The only problem is people would not really want that, just like they would not want police to enforce speed limit laws.

The other way to think about this, how much of our phone use when driving is because of lack of public transit and the requirement to commute to work? There are different ways of addressing the same problem.

Alcohol is pretty terrible for your body and is carcinogenic. Then again, so is sunlight, or, as the parent pointed out, sugar, sat-fats, etc. The difference is I need some amount of sunlight and saturated fat to live.

Alcohol also heavily correlates with assaults, rapes, domestic violence, and murder. Something crazy high like 60% or more of assaults. Ditto for things like car accidents after 9pm -- overwhelmingly alcohol related. DUIs kill a non-trivial amount of people.