First of all, it is important to remember that not all drunk drivers are going to be showing obvious signs of intoxication on the road. One of the things that makes drunk driving so insidious is the simple fact that drunk drivers can appear to be normal and healthy motorists to other people on the road until it is too late. There’s also the fact that some drunk drivers can go in the opposite direction. They can seem to come out of nowhere, and the motorists who become their victims will barely have any time to react before their lives are changed forever, or worse.

However, some motorists will be fortunate enough to react to the drunk drivers who are on the road. Many of them are going to be displaying obvious signs of drunkenness. This will at least give healthy motorists a chance to pull over or otherwise get out of the way of the drunk drivers who are posing a threat to them at any given moment. Motorists who have gotten themselves out of harm’s way in this case are strongly advised to call the police in that situation. There should be traffic cops nearby who can intervene in this sort of situation.

Many drunk drivers will swerve and weave a lot within their lanes. Drinking severely impairs a person’s coordination. Drunk drivers are often not able to maintain the steady hand that people need in order to hold onto the steering wheel and keep the car on course.

Drunk drivers also don’t maintain a consistent speed. They will stop and start their cars at random points on the road, and they will raise and lower their speeds rapidly. Traffic cops will often look for these signs when they are trying to spot drunk drivers in the first place.

Ultimately, the main effect of alcohol is that it slows a person down. Alcohol is a depressant. Driving is the sort of skill that requires a person with strong reaction time, and people need to be able to pay attention to many different factors when they’re on the road. Drunk drivers often don’t respond to traffic signals, and they don’t use traffic signals themselves. Their turn signals will be off when they’re trying to turn, their lights will be off even when it’s night time, and they won’t pay attention to traffic lights and stop lights. The communication skills of the road demand sobriety, regardless of the false bravado and confidence that so many alcoholics and drunkards seem to have.

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.

Understanding the demographics of drunk driving may help society at large work towards preventing it. It may also help clear up some of the pervasive myths surrounding drunk driving. Far too many people are still trying to lower the drinking age in the United States from 21 to 18, believing that this is somehow going to solve the problem, or at least improve it.

For one thing, people aged 21 to 25 are more likely to commit drunk driving than any other demographic when it comes to age. People under the age of 45 all still have relatively high drunk driving rates compared to the middle-aged.

States that have had a drinking age of 18 had higher rates of drunk driving, with all of the associated consequences, compared to states that had the drinking age of 21. In fact, nations that lowered their drinking age from the twenties to the late teens, such as New Zealand, saw an increase in drunk driving, binge drinking, and other problems overnight. European nations where the drinking age is 18 have more problems with alcohol than the United States, not less. Giving very young people more freedom with alcohol cannot be the solution.

The popular refrain that says that 18-year-old people are old enough to join the military, and should therefore be old enough to drink, draws an odd false equivalence. For one thing, that really sounds like an argument for increasing the age at which someone should join the military. For another thing, people don’t make this argument about other things, even though it could technically apply.

People can’t rent a car until age 25 and can’t run for Congress until that age either. They can’t rent a hotel room until 21, which is also the legal age for drinking. Few people talk about how individuals who can join the military should also be able to run for Congress, rent a car, or rent a hotel room. These issues are nowhere near as politicized, and most people know that running for Congress is a big responsibility. A child who just became a legal adult last week should not be making decisions that affect the lives of an entire nation of people.

Similarly, a child who just became a legal adult last week should not be given the power to voluntarily impair his or her senses and reaction time in the manner of a drunk person. Given the demographics, a case could be made for raising the drinking age to 26, matching it up with the age at which people can no longer stay on their parents’ insurance. Most people’s brains have finished developing by their mid-twenties, making this a better drinking age. Individuals who are trying to tamper with the legal drinking age may be getting more than they bargained for, so they’re advised to take what they can get.