Only 16 Days Left to Get License Before New Law Takes Effect

Missouri drivers have only a few more weeks to get SATOP tests done and get their licenses renewed.

After that it will be much harder to get your license and when you do, any car you drive will have to be equipped with a breathalizer lock.

That seems so severe yet like the lawmakers, I too wonder what else could be done. Alcoholism is a disease, an addiction, and every little social and legal nuance degrades these people and leaves them with nothing except using alcohol to escape from a world they cannot function in -- not because they are alcoholics, but because they have been stripped of every avenue of improvement and recovery.

Only 16 Days Left to Get License Before New Law Takes Effect

Senate Bills 930 and 947 Passed

A new Missouri law takes effect July 1, 2009 which will make it legal to attach ignition interlock devices to family vehicles if one member of the family is an alcoholic. Better than prison but punishes entire family now.

I agree that alcoholics, whether your parent, sibling, mate, or child, all alcoholics create a heavy burden on those who love them enough to continue being responsible for them. They often fail to understand the burden of responsibility their family feels.

I don't know the answer or even where to begin to cure alcoholism. I drank alcoholic drinks during my twenties but I quickly learned that the effect was to make me stupid. I could no longer think and felt loss of control of environment so I just quit drinking any type of alcoholic drinks and have never missed it.

However, any person who shows signs of even slight drunkeness in my presence, I shun. Why not? Drunkeness is repulsive to me because the same person sober is so much more intelligent to talk to. The drunk puts out an aura of inhumanity which causes people to ignore them, repulsed by them.

Senate Bills 930 and 947 Passed

Tides are Ebbing and Flowing: Help Alcoholics or Imprison Them

Alcoholism is a disease that robs men and women of security, safety, and dignity.  It is a horrible painful life for alcoholics because he or she gradually loses family, friends, home, and freedom.  This is because the disease is misunderstood.

We all know someone who is an alcoholic.   When he or she gets to the drunk state, the main thing anyone around the drunk wants is to remove the drunk.  A drunk person is rarely perceived as a human being.  Types of drunks vary from completely insane to idiot savant.

I never waste time on a drunk.  The only thing to do is remove them from the public and keep them separated until sober.   But not removed and placed into the criminal prison system -- in that system these basically good and decent men and women sober up, yes, but their first taste of longterm sobriety is spent in a prison cell and not in their homes with families.

Tides are Ebbing and Flowing: Help Alcoholics or Imprison Them

Missouri's Crack Down on DWI

Missouri conducted a Holiday Impaired Driving Mobilization Campaign in December 2008. Nearly 150 law enforcement agencies received mini-grants to cover the cost of officer overtime for saturation patrols and sobriety checkpoints. 

A press conference in Joplin, MO brought attention to the statewide campaign.  In  Joplin they recently hired two full-time DWI officers through a Missouri Highway Safety Office grant.

Radio and Internet ads dramatizing car accidents then superimposing drunk drivers over it, flooded the media.

Missouri's Crack Down on DWI

MADD Outdated and Dense

I was reading Drunk Driving: Rail vs. Jail by Warren Redlich in which he writes:

The truth is that criminal enforcement does not work adequately as a deterrent.

Many people continue drinking and driving. Humans have had problems with alcohol for thousands of years. Combine that with the fact that alternatives to driving are inadequate in most of the US, and it's not surprising that the problem has not gone away.

As a nation we spend billions on DWI enforcement. This includes police salaries and equipment, prosecutors, court staff, jails, probation officers and more. Those billions would be better spent on increased mass transit, which would provide a genuine alternative to driving.

Why do we as a nation keep banging our heads against a brick wall. Are we that dense? I watched tv news last night and watched as a soccer mom was arrested for a dwi after an afternoon meeting with other moms at a neighborhood lounge.  She did not appear drunk at all and talked cohently.  No kids were involved at all.  

She barely went over the Misssouri limit and was guilty of only taking an afternoon off to get together with her friends but now she is in jail and has to suffer the humiliation of it all.  She said when she left the lounge she did not think she'd had enough wine to be  a dui.  But she did.  

Is it just me or doesn't all this MADD tight ass enforcement go too far.

MADD Outdated and Dense

Nearly Two Million Arrested for DUI in 2006

According to MADD's 2008 Summary Statistics:

• Seventy-five of the fatal crashes between midnight and 3 AM involve alcohol.

• Over 1.46 million drivers were arrested in 2006 for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. This is an arrest rate of 1 for every 139 licensed drivers in the United States.
  

• One arrest is made for driving under the influence for every 772 episodes of driving within two hours of drinking and for every 88 episodes of driving over the illegal limit in the U.S.
  

• Of the approximately 4.2 million people aged 16 to 20 in 2002 and 2003 who reported DUI involving alcohol or illicit drugs in the past year, about four percent (169,000 people) indicated they had been arrested and booked for DUI.
  

• Among the 5.3 million convicted offenders under the jurisdiction of corrections agencies in 1996, nearly 2 million, or about 36 percent, were estimated to have been drinking at the time of the offense.

But there are many facts not mentioned here. For instance, how do these statistics hold up relative to sleeping drivers having accidents, rage drivers having accidents, careless drivers, and so on. Should they all go to prison too

Nearly Two Million Arrested for DUI in 2006