Experts and activists in drinking and driving all often have the same simple question: why? Why do people drink and drive? Why put your life at risk and the lives of others at risk instead of calling a cab, getting a designated driver, or failing to publicly binge drink in the first place? It seems like a terrifyingly large risk for so little gain, and yet it happens often enough to be a social epidemic worldwide.

In order to evaluate the causes, you just have to look at the demographics of the people who drink and drive, especially in the United States. Men drink and drive more often than women. This has nothing to do with any sort of spurious fundamental biological difference between the sexes, and everything to do with the fact that many men feel the need to take risks in order to prove their masculinity to one another.

Masculinity in American culture is partly characterized as not having an aversion to anything, and that includes high levels of alcohol for some men. Binge drinking is universal among fraternity brothers, and the boys who do it are trying to perform their masculinity in front of one another due to the way that American culture defines masculinity.

Youth is a huge factor. The people who commit drunk driving offenses the most are young. Many of them are teenagers or twenty-somethings. The rate of drunk driving doesn’t start to seriously decline until the people in question are over 45. Some of this is due to the fact that people in their mid and late forties and beyond have familial responsibilities and similar grounding forces in their lives. Lack of brain development can explain teen drinking, but it doesn’t explain drinking among people who are well into their twenties and beyond. Culturally, there is an idea that one’s twenties should be spent having fun, which is apparently characterized by getting drunk a lot.

People in their early and mid-twenties are often still in college. College has been an environment that has encouraged binge drinking for a long time. Binge drinking is thoroughly normalized on college campuses. It’s seen as a normal part of the college experience, with all that that implies. Socially, college students will live down to those expectations as much as they possibly can in many cases.

Eliminating drinking and driving altogether is going to require some widespread cultural changes. Simply attacking the problem itself is treating a symptom. As important as it is to attack drunk driving in all of its forms and regardless of its cause, as long as certain aspects of the culture normalize binge drinking, it will still be with us in some form and at some level.

We need to embrace a version of masculinity that doesn’t celebrate irrational behavior, risk taking, and pretending that one’s body is capable of anything and immune to everything. We need to treat campus binge drinking as a problem and not a simple reality of college life that just happens to get students and other people killed. We need to eliminate the idea that having fun in one’s twenties involves drinking at the exclusion of the personal development that it should involve. Safe drinking is one thing, but our culture celebrates unsafe drinking. We are enabling and encouraging drunk driving deaths in the process.

It should be noted that the problems associated with drunk driving have genuinely gotten better as more programs and public money have been devoted to the issue. Drunk driving was a much more pervasive societal problem before the year 1980. Taking action against drunk driving has made a statistically significant difference. The founding of MADD alone has reduced drunk driving deaths by fifty percent since 1980.

As horrifying as the drunk driving statistics still are, it is important for people not to lose hope. Far too many people go from denying to problem to becoming so cynical about the problem that they’re not going to try to work towards a solution of any kind. The deaths from drunk driving accidents can be halved again. They should be halved again, because the problem is far from over, and the number of deaths from drunk driving in the United States alone is still staggering.

An estimated 28 people die in ‘accidents’ caused by drunk driving every single day. I want to stress again that I don’t think that the term ‘accident’ applies here in any way. Getting behind the wheel of a car drunk means that you are risking your life and the lives of almost everyone you might come in contact with until you crash. Drunk driving ‘accidents’ are both preventable and predictable, which more or less negates the idea that they are somehow genuine accidents.

Adults in the United States all absorb the costs of drunk driving. Every adult spends around 800 dollars a year on drunk driving. Adults who were asked to pay an equivalent amount in extra taxes would probably flip, but many of them turn a blind eye to the costs of drunk driving.

Anyone who has any doubts about the prevalence of drunk driving should remember that 29.1 million people in the United States said that they have driven under the influence of alcohol in 2012 alone. While drunk driving is more prevalent in certain states than others, it is still clearly widespread in the nation at large. For all the progress that we’ve made, we still have a long way to go, and these figures are going to quickly look dismal in the future.

Lots of adults can fall into the trap of thinking that all of the problems that teenagers face are trivial, and that teenagers will be able to walk away from almost all of the poor decisions that they make at this point during their lives. Teenagers certainly absorb this message. Some of them even try to take advantage of the legal and social protections that this life stage offers them. They figure that they can get these sorts of actions of the way now, and they will have to clean up their acts when they turn eighteen.

However, most teenagers aren’t calculating in that sense. The decision-making parts of their brains haven’t formed yet. They aren’t thinking beyond next week, let alone next year. Teenagers will typically drink and drive based mainly on their lousy judgment skills. Some of them will just think that they will be able to handle it, and that the adults in their lives are exaggerating all of the dangers of drinking and driving. Teenagers are in a state of rebellion because they are trying to establish their own identities, and far too many of them rebel against everything, including basic reason.

When parents figure that their teens can bounce back from anything, they’re wrong. The legal and social protections that teenagers have are extremely limited in nature. It isn’t a myth that teenagers can be tried as adults. Teenagers who are over the age of sixteen in particular are more likely to have their cases ‘subject to waiver,’ meaning their juvenile court protections are going to be waived, and they will be tried in adult courts.

Juvenile offenders who commit serious offenses are more likely to have their juvenile protections waived. Killing someone in a drunk driving case is considered a serious offense. Juveniles who have had a lot of repeat offenses may also have their juvenile court privileges waived. If it looks like rehabilitating them has been unsuccessful in the past, then the courts will be that much more likely to decide that they require the more severe sentence. Juvenile offenders certainly are not immune to getting prison sentences, including prison sentences that they must serve alongside adults. Parents should not fall into the trap of thinking that the legal system is less harsh than it is, and they should make sure that their teenagers know that.

Some of the permanent consequences of teen drinking are biological. Teens stunt their brain development by having so much to drink so early in life. They’re impairing everything from their future learning ability to their future capacity for memory. The teen years are a critical period of development in general, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. Teenagers who binge drink this early in life are also setting themselves up for a lifetime of addiction. Many alcoholics started drinking nearly a decade before the legal age of alcohol consumption. Not all teenagers who drink will suffer from this terrible fate. However, it is a risk for all of them, and they aren’t always alone when it comes to the people who will suffer from the consequences of their actions.

Our culture can’t keep pretending teenagers are immune to things that can claim their lives. Teenagers do not have an ability to bounce back from anything, and they can destroy their adult lives before they’ve even begun. Parents need to know that, and they need to know how to separate harmless kids’ stuff from fatal mistakes.