mad about madd

here's my latest column from the paper. if you want more info on MADD and DUI law, i suggest these sites.

peace,

k

Carpe Diem: Drinking Becomes MADDening

Kurt Brighton

4:05 p.m. MT Dec 14, 2007

All right Fort Collins, you’re not trying hard enough.

Men’s Health magazine recently released its list of America’s “most dangerously drunk” cities, which was topped by the No. 1 drunkest city, Denver, with Colorado Springs coming in at a respectable third. Even Aurora made the top 100. But Fort Collins didn’t even make the list.

Excuse me?

I guess the editors have never been out in Old Town on a weekend, when one can witness our flourishing Idiocracy convening for its weekly meetings.
In all seriousness, the criteria with which the editors selected cities for this dubious honor are somewhat dubious themselves.

Some things make sense: They started with each city’s numbers on alcohol-related liver disease, and the Department of Transportation’s statistics on alcohol-related fatal car crashes. Keep in mind that DOT counts any alcohol involved in any way in an accident as “alcohol-related.” In other words, if you are dead-cold sober and you strike a wasted pedestrian attempting to cross Interstate 25 during rush hour, that gets counted as an “alcohol-related accident.” Who was actually drunk in the collision—or if they were even over the legal threshold for DUI—doesn’t matter. But we’ll let that one go.

Here’s where the criteria begin to get even fuzzier. Next up, the editors compared each city’s “number of binge drinkers,” data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control. A binge drinker is defined by the CDC as someone who has five or more drinks in one sitting.

Or as the staff of the Fort Collins Now calls it, lunch.

Seriously, though, how did the CDC come by this information—a telephone survey? Did they send observers into various bars in each city and count the number of drinks each person had on a given night? And what if those five drinks happened on one night, but not for the rest of the month? Is that person still a “binge drinker?”

Another factor in the rankings that employed questionable use of statistics is the number of DUI arrests in each city. The higher the number, the higher a city’s ranking.
Question: If more drunks are being pulled off the streets, doesn’t that make a city safer? If Barney Fife is napping in his squad car in Dustville, Kan., while drunks weave past him on their way to the next bar, isn’t that more dangerous?

Finally, the last factor entered into the data was a Mothers Against Drunk Driving “report card” in which the organization assesses the efforts each city is putting into reducing drunk driving. This organization has been so corrupted by a growing ultra-conservative puritanism and the power and money that flow their way—as long as they keep the nation in a constant state of low-level panic about drunken drivers—that any statistics or studies they produce should be questioned. And then jettisoned immediately.

While MADD may have started out with the best intentions, these are the same people who are pushing to have interlock devices installed on all new vehicles—devices which are used to prevent habitual DUI offenders from starting their cars after blowing into an on-board breathalyzer. If a driver shows any alcohol in their systems, the vehicle won’t start—fine for someone who has racked up DUIs in the double digits. But what if you or I have a glass of wine with dinner? Or, God forbid, even two?

MADD made nearly $4 million in 2005 alone just from its Victim’s Impact Panels, a court-ordered re-education technique used in Colorado and other states for those convicted of DUI. And the nonprofit socked away almost $13 million in taxpayer funds in 2004 alone.

For years now, the organization’s agenda has been sliding down a slippery slope from preventing dangerous drunken drivers from hurting people to preventing anyone from drinking any amount and then operating a vehicle. Or maybe from drinking at all. There’s a difference between being impaired by alcohol and having alcohol in your system, and MADD has successfully blurred that line—and it is reaping the financial benefits.

Understand, this column is not meant to advocate drunken driving, or even drunken stupidity on foot. It’s to suggest that instead of swallowing whole the fear-mongering and incremental suspension of liberties that accompany the DUI issue, we should question any organization that finds its power and funding enhanced as a result of it.

And that includes the police.

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