I won’t deny that the new drunk driving laws will have a negative impact on some businesses, and I won’t deny that recent news reports indicate this is just another tax grab, but how long can we continue to deny the devastation caused by drunk or dangerous drivers?

Candy Lightner was just 33 years old when her 13 year old daughter Cari was savagely struck by a vehicle that tossed her young body 125 feet down the road from the force of the impact. Cari’s body was so badly mutilated that her organs could not be used for transplantation. The driver of the vehicle, William Busch, didn’t bother to stop at the scene of the carnage, having already been charged and convicted four times previously for drunk driving. Only 48 hours before butchering Cari Lightner with his vehicle, Busch had been arrested for another hit-and-run incident. This was not the first time that Candy Lightener’s life had been impacted by a drunk driver, as she and her twin sister had been injured when the car driven by her mother was rear-ended by a drunk driver. Lightener’s son Travis, at age four, had been run over by a driver ‘intoxicated’ on tranquilizers causing permanent disability to her son. Not one person spent any time in prison for the harm caused to Lightener and her family by these incidents.

A March headline read “Serial drunk driver described as a ‘time bomb’” (Comox Valley Echo, Mar. 9, 2010:A4) – a phrase used by Judge Peter Doherty in describing a 28 year old man with three prior drunk driving convictions. “I’m very concerned for the public,” said Doherty in the article, “I have to let him out some time and today’s the day.” Which begs the question: why does this individual deserve to be free to be a ‘concern for the public’? The article stated that he was “terrified of the other inmates” but our terror at potentially being butchered by some drunkard carries no weight? The article further indicates that the individual “will likely lose his job and his home” but those losses for someone else injured or killed by a drunk driver are of no matter? Why does the justice system persist in allowing drunkards back on the streets to terrify others rather than keeping them incarcerated to learn from their own terrifying experiences?

Consider the following: four individuals in the Comox Valley are profiled in the ‘Court Parade’ (Comox Valley Echo, October 8, 2010:A9) who are convicted of ‘drunk driving’ – three of the individuals have blood alcohol levels that are over three times the legislated level (0.08) for impairment – .280 and .270; .240 and .250; .290 and .300 while the fourth simply crashed his car into a telephone pole while ‘drunk’. In each case, the convicted individual was given a modest fine (ranging from $1,000 to $1,500) and driving prohibitions and probationary sentences ranging from one to two years. The reality that faces us is that there are about 4,800 drunk-driving ‘crashes’ per year in British Columbia resulting in 115 deaths and 2,900 injuries (ICBC).

We consider death the worst thing that can happen, but ask anyone whose life has been affected by a drunk driver and the response may be that it’s not the worst it’s just the most definite. Candy Lightener’s life was impacted by injury to herself, to her son and by the death of her daughter Cari. Her response to these multiple tragedies was not to give in to grief, but to actively try to achieve change. On May 7, 1980, a mere four days after Cari’s funeral, Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) in the basement den of her home. The name would eventually be changed to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the concept was the same – to seek an end to the carnage created by chronic drunk drivers. Candy lobbied to have drunk driving recognized for what it really is, namely “the only acceptable form of homicide” (David J. Hanson, Alcohol Problems and Solutions).

Yet the long history of alcohol regulation has been one of abject failure – Temperance in the 19th century moralized the ‘drunkard’ in the hopes that the individual would sign a pledge to stop drinking. Many signed on their way in and out of saloons but few ever stopped drinking. The next phase brought Prohibition to Canada and the United States, with the former repealing the legislation almost before the ink was dry on the document. The United States began its first ‘war on drugs’ and made criminals rich but had little impact on drinking behaviours.

The next phase was to medicalize problem drinking as a disease called ‘alcoholism’ which facilitated the problems associated with attempts to regulate drunk driving that now exist. By labelling ‘behaviour’ as a ‘disease’ the emphasis on individual responsibility was removed in favour of ‘treatment’. It was not until drunk driving behaviour was re-imaged as a moral problem by organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving that governments and individuals began to realize that it was an unacceptable behaviour irrespective of its etiology.

On September 20th the British Columbia Provincial Government introduced new drunk-driving legislation which imposes stiff penalties for a first offence, and increasingly more punitive fines, suspensions and administrative costs with each subsequent charge. This new legislation is different not only in imposing more severe penalties, but that it effectively gets a drunk driver off the road immediately. We may consider it draconian and over-reacting, but the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver would probably consider it a small sacrifice in comparison. As would anyone whose life has been changed forever by a drunk driver.