Drunk Driving in not a Crime

The glaring problem with the argument that drunk drivers are uniquely dangerous and uniquely evil, however, is that there are plenty of other drivers in this world that are equally dangerous and deadly, but who are not vilified, hunted down and imprisoned by the state. There are sleepy drivers, drivers toying with their stereos, drivers old enough to have seen Great Depression I, drivers with dogs on their laps, drivers putting on makeup, drivers with glasses thicker than their taillights, teenage drivers, drivers looking at maps, drivers with the flu, drivers screaming at their spouses, drivers with kids fighting in the backseat, drivers eating tacos, virtually every single driver in Los Angeles…

The Fact That Drunk Drivers 'Choose' to Drive Drunk Is Completely Irrelevant — by Mark R. Crovelli

There is a virtual consensus among the American public that drunk driving is an horrific crime that deserves only ruthless punishment. Indeed, the level of consensus on this issue is so unanimous that virtually the only debate that ever occurs with regard to drunk driving revolves around how best to step up enforcement and inflict ever more merciless punishments on people who choose to drive drunk. Few and far between are any substantive criticisms of the idea of hunting down and imprisoning people, just because they happen to have an arbitrary amount of alcohol in their blood.

One of the major reasons why this level of consensus has emerged in recent decades is that the proponents of drunk-driving prohibition have seized the moral high ground. They have accomplished this primarily by portraying drunk drivers as uniquely dangerous and uniquely evil drivers – drunk drivers are the great and deadly scourge of the modern world. The drunk driver is painted as the moral and legal equivalent of a man pointing a loaded shotgun at a crowd of innocent people – a menace crying out for the state to step in and "disarm" (i.e., mercilessly punish him) before he kills or hurts anyone…READ MORE