Dear Editor,
(in response to April 17’s “Best Late Night Eateries”) I realize you are a student publication, with columns and news features written by college students, a population not typically known for their maturity or sobriety. I commend you on recent awards, but must caution you of the terrifying influence of your flippant attitude toward alcohol consumption and driving.
In a recent feature, writers Jessica Williams and Kevin Zansler expressed a deplorable lightheartedness towards the issue of drunk driving.
I should not have to remind anyone about the sobering (pun intended) effects of this social malady: each day, 36 people in this country are killed by alcohol-related traffic incidents; in the time it took to write this letter, one was killed and 15 injured (source: http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/drving.htm).
First of all, there is no such thing as “sobering up immediately,” as the writers suggest. It takes the human body well over an hour to metabolize the alcohol content of even a single bottle of beer (a 180-lb male drinking a single bottle of beer has an estimated BAC of 0.020; alcohol metabolizes at a rate of about 0.015 BAC per hour, via http://www.brad21.org/bac_charts.html). While not legally drunk at a BAC of 0.020, you are also not sober. Only time — not chow — can make you sober.
Secondly, the use of the phrase “just too drunk” implies that there is a point at which you are “just drunk enough” to still drive safely. Driving skills begin to become impaired from the very first drink, and become significantly impaired at a BAC of approximately 0.040. That’s just two drinks in one hour for the average person.
Williams and Zansler obviously had in mind something more than two drinks a night, as their “stumbling drunk” phrase betrays. Assuming you started your bar hopping at 10:00 p.m., drank an average of 1.5 drinks per hour, and were “stumbling” around at 4:00 a.m., you’d have a BAC of 0.09, over the legal intoxication limit, but, more importantly, well over the point at which your driving skills would be impaired.
To The Maroon: You are endangering lives by even suggesting half-seriously that someone that far under the influence could “sober up immediately for the drive home.” That person would still be drunk in their 8:30 economics class that morning, if they weren’t in jail or a mortuary instead. If you bar hop, leave the keys at home.
Sincerely,
Nate Straight
College of Business assessment coordinator
[email protected]
