This year in the UK we 'celebrate' 25 years of government anti-drink driving campaigns - those 30-second slices of depression in between the toy adverts on TV at Christmas. And according to the government, it was worth it - apparently, the campaigns have saved 20,000 lives, with the number of fatalities caused by drink driving falling from over 2000 a year when the government launched its campaign to 460 in 1999 (1).
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This must be one of the most successful government safety campaigns ever. Drinking and driving is now widely regarded as antisocial and morally reprehensible - as illustrated by the British Medical Association's proposal reported on 10 December that doctors be allowed to take blood samples from unconscious road accident victims to determine whether they have been drinking, for legal rather than clinical reasons (2).
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The UK government has produced some hard-hitting campaigns in recent years, with images of the pain and hardship caused by drunk drivers. But its campaigns were not always so moralistic. In the 1980s, ads focused on how breaking the law would adversely affect the driver - meaning a ban from driving, the inconvenience of not being able to get around, and a doubling of your insurance premiums once you got your licence back.
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It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the tone changed to 'Drinking and driving wrecks lives'. Suddenly we were presented with pictures of tearful little girls wondering how to explain that daddy had killed a little boy, or Dave the quadriplegic being spoonfed by his mother. The message was clear: if you don't want to be branded a murderer or end up severely disabled, don't drink and drive (3).
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It is not unreasonable to think that, when the government uses images of tearful little girls to get its message across, anything it says should be treated with caution. So what is the truth about drink driving?
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Firstly, it should be noted that, in general, the risk of death or serious injury on Britain's roads is very low. Cars travelled 228billion miles in 1999, with a total of 43,062 cars involved in accidents where somebody was killed or seriously injured. So a car could expect to be involved in a serious accident once every 5.3million miles. With an average mileage of about 10,000 miles per year, a private car can expect to be involved in a serious accident once every 530 years.
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Secondly, it is true that driving under the influence of drink increases the relative risk of being involved in an accident. But according to research by RF Borkenstein in the early 1960s and HP Krüger in the early 1990s (5), the relationship between drinking and being involved in an accident is not a linear one.
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At low levels of blood alcohol, there is little or no increase in accident risk. At 0.04 percent blood alcohol (that is, 40 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood), there may even be a reduction in risk - with drivers taking greater care, fearful that they might be breaking the law, even though they aren't. At the UK legal limit of 0.08 percent, the risk of being involved in an accident is five times greater than when sober - and at double the legal blood alcohol level, 0.16 percent, the risk is 25 times greater than when sober.
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So drinking does affect your driving - but it is a relative risk. The absolute risk would still appear to be small. If there is a serious accident every 5.3million miles under normal circumstances and the risk increases 25-fold for a driver at double the legal limit, a serious accident at double the legal limit could be expected about once every 212,000 miles.
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To put that in perspective: if a driver drove home 10 miles once a week at twice the legal limit, on average he would have a serious accident once every 408 years. But still the drink-drive campaigns hammer home a message of maximum risk during Christmas nights out - which is especially odd, considering that far more road deaths occur in daylight hours and during the summer (6).
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The government's argument that 20,000 lives have been saved by its anti-drink driving campaign beggars belief. Accident rates have been declining anyway - so there were 246,000 road accidents in 1975 and 235,000 in 2000, even though there was more than twice as much road traffic in 2000 (7).
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Also, 460 deaths were said to be the result of drink-related accidents in 1999, but that doesn't mean that alcohol caused all those accidents. Only five percent of road casualties are the result of drink-related accidents (8). So if 95 percent of road injuries can be caused by other factors that have nothing to do with alcohol, surely some of the drink-drive accidents could have been caused by similar factors?
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Drinking and driving is a problem - and this Christmas a handful of people will die in accidents caused by somebody who was drinking. But more people will die in accidents where the drivers are sober. Like just about everything else in life, travelling on roads in moving vehicles involves some element of risk, but it's a very small risk. And even getting out of cars and walking instead doesn't necessarily remove the risk - as one third of pedestrians killed in accidents involving cars in the UK are over the legal limit for driving (9).
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Does this problem justify the government's heavy-handed response? I don't think so. What the drink-drive campaigns have really done is push a moralistic, anti-alcohol message at Christmas that would have been difficult to do more openly. After all, nobody would argue for prohibition, but if the government can just activate that little voice in our heads that says drinking too much is risky and selfish….
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This would explain the press release to the government's 1997 campaign: 'The campaigns to date have been very successful in establishing that drinking and driving is morally wrong. However, a large number of people still manage to avoid applying this to their own behaviour because they define a drink driver as someone who is clearly drunk. They do not consider that their own social drinking is in this category of immoral drinking and driving.'
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The press release then goes on to suggest that having one or two drinks will make you responsible 'for killing, crippling and maiming thousands in drink drive accidents' - which is quite at odds with the evidence that low levels of blood alcohol do not significantly increase the risk of causing an accident (10).
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Drinking and driving is an antisocial thing to do, but most people knew that before there were any drink driving campaigns. Some claim that the more guilt-trippy of the government's adverts could even be counterproductive, 'further challeng[ing] our ability to change our behaviour and our actions by ourselves' (11).
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One thing is clear: the moral message being shoved down our throats is out of all proportion to the harm caused by drinking and driving.
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Read on:
Have yourself a very scary Christmas, by Brendan O'Neill
'Sensible celebrating', by Munira Mirza
(1) Anti-drink-driving campaign to build on past success, Guardian, 4 December 2001; Road Accidents Great Britain: 2000, Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions. The figure of 520 quoted by the government for 2000 is still a provisional figure
(2) Doctors want to trap drink drivers, BBC Online, 10 December 2001
(3) 25 years of anti-drink-drive campaigns, MediaGuardian
(4) Road Accidents Great Britain: 2000, Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions
(5) Grand Rapids effects revisited, HP Kruger et al, University of Wuerzburg
(6) Road Accidents Great Britain: 2000, Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions
(7) Road Accidents Great Britain: 2000, Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions
(8) Road Accidents Great Britain: 2000, Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions. The report also estimates that 13 percent of fatal accidents are drink-related
(9) Drink walking: there has to be a limit, BBC Online, 29 August 2001
(10) Drink driving campaign 1997 - Introduction, DETR
(11) Don't drink and drive, and don't preach, Daily Telegraph, 8 December
2001
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