DRINK DRIVING: THE FACTS
ALCOHOL AND AUTOMOBILES DON’T MIX
If you drive at twice the legal alcohol limit, you are at least 20 times more likely to be involved in a road crash than a driver who has not been drinking.
Any amount of alcohol affects your ability to drive. There is no foolproof way of drinking alcohol and staying under the limit or of knowing how much an individual person can drink and still drive safely. Each person’s tolerance to alcohol depends on a range of factors such as:
The only safe option is not to drink alcohol if you plan to drive, and never offer an alcoholic drink to someone else who is intending to drive.
Each year, hundreds of people are killed in road accidents in Malawi and thousands more are seriously injured. Yet it is often not possible to determine how many of these collisions are alcohol-related because the report will generally list just one single factor.
For example, when attending a scene where a driver has overtaken another vehicle on a blind bend, overshot and skidded off the road, then rammed into a tree and not survived, this may simply be listed as a case of “over-speeding” or “careless overtaking”. What may not be so obvious - and therefore not reported - is that the driver had been drinking, which would have impaired his vision, affected his judgement, increased his reaction time and made him over-confident and reckless - all leading him to drive too fast for that stretch of road and risk overtaking in highly dangerous circumstances.
Being just below the legal alcohol limit is no guarantee that your driving ability will be unimpaired. At 50% above the limit, your chances of being involved in a fatal or serious injury accident are about five times higher than those of a completely sober driver. At twice the legal limit, that figure rises to twenty times or more.
Once you have had a few drinks, the only thing that will reduce your alcohol level is time - and plenty of time at that. Your body can only metabolise one unit of alcohol per hour (roughly the equivalent of one bottle of ordinary strength beer). So, after a heavy drinking session, you could still be over the limit the following morning, or even much later in the day. In the UK, there have been cases of people being convicted of drink-driving when they had not had a drink for twenty-four hours. Black coffee or hangover medicines might make you feel better but they won’t bring your alcohol level down any faster.
And, if you are so arrogant and thoughtless that you couldn’t care less about endangering the lives of others, bear in mind that many of the deaths in drink-related accidents are of the driver himself. Drinking and driving really does wreck lives.
Any amount of alcohol affects your ability to drive. There is no foolproof way of drinking alcohol and staying under the limit or of knowing how much an individual person can drink and still drive safely. Each person’s tolerance to alcohol depends on a range of factors such as:
- weight
- gender
- age
- metabolism
- current stress levels
- whether they have eaten recently
- amount of alcohol consumed
The only safe option is not to drink alcohol if you plan to drive, and never offer an alcoholic drink to someone else who is intending to drive.
Each year, hundreds of people are killed in road accidents in Malawi and thousands more are seriously injured. Yet it is often not possible to determine how many of these collisions are alcohol-related because the report will generally list just one single factor.
For example, when attending a scene where a driver has overtaken another vehicle on a blind bend, overshot and skidded off the road, then rammed into a tree and not survived, this may simply be listed as a case of “over-speeding” or “careless overtaking”. What may not be so obvious - and therefore not reported - is that the driver had been drinking, which would have impaired his vision, affected his judgement, increased his reaction time and made him over-confident and reckless - all leading him to drive too fast for that stretch of road and risk overtaking in highly dangerous circumstances.
Being just below the legal alcohol limit is no guarantee that your driving ability will be unimpaired. At 50% above the limit, your chances of being involved in a fatal or serious injury accident are about five times higher than those of a completely sober driver. At twice the legal limit, that figure rises to twenty times or more.
Once you have had a few drinks, the only thing that will reduce your alcohol level is time - and plenty of time at that. Your body can only metabolise one unit of alcohol per hour (roughly the equivalent of one bottle of ordinary strength beer). So, after a heavy drinking session, you could still be over the limit the following morning, or even much later in the day. In the UK, there have been cases of people being convicted of drink-driving when they had not had a drink for twenty-four hours. Black coffee or hangover medicines might make you feel better but they won’t bring your alcohol level down any faster.
And, if you are so arrogant and thoughtless that you couldn’t care less about endangering the lives of others, bear in mind that many of the deaths in drink-related accidents are of the driver himself. Drinking and driving really does wreck lives.
