Workplaces and families are hosting holiday parties this
weekend, and the holiday cheer will be in many forms: verbal,
visual and liquid.
Workplaces and families are hosting holiday parties this weekend, and the holiday cheer will be in many forms: verbal, visual and liquid.
Alcoholic beverages are often a staple of these get-togethers, which is perfectly legal so long as drinkers are 21 or older. The biggest danger comes if the drinkers get behind the wheel to go home.
Police agencies are in the midst of their campaigns against drinking and driving this weekend.
There are now 15 police agencies in the Avoid the 13 campaign. Locally, officers from Morgan Hill, Gilroy, the Sheriff’s Department and CHP have extra officers on the roads and run checkpoints in the area to catch drunk drivers.
The Avoid the 13 campaign is under way through New Year’s Day.
Morgan Hill PD will conduct a sobriety checkpoint from 9 p.m. to approximately midnight Saturday on Monterey Road, south of Old Monterey Road – between Wright Avenue and Cochrane Road.
“The holiday season is when the deaths happen,” said Laura Plum, who manages the Bay Area chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving in San Jose. “Forty percent of all (nationwide, alcohol-related highway) fatalities happen during the holidays: … Thanksgiving to New Year’s, Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day.”
The good news is that in 2002, there were no alcohol-related deaths on South Valley highways between the day before Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Still, who wants to start a bad trend?
In California in 2002, there were 148 alcohol-related deaths between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, according to MADD. In the U.S., there were 2,053.
“That’s a lot of people to lose in a matter of (less than) 40 days,” Plum said.
“The $20 or $30 you pay for a cab are worth it if you think about how you could kill yourself or someone else.”
Death aside, there are other negative consequences of drinking and driving, not least of which is the possibility of a driving-under-the-influence arrest.
Local CHP officers made 74 DUI arrests during the 2002 Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s Eve holiday season, an average of about two a day. Gilroy police and sheriff’s deputies added dozens more, although their DUIs in the 20 days between Dec. 13 and Jan. 1 – during the annual “Avoid the 13” anti-drunk driving campaign – were half what they had been in 2001.
For most people, two drinks in less than an hour will put their blood-alcohol content at or above the legal limit of .08 percent. A 12-ounce beer, an average glass of wine and a shot of hard liquor all count as a drink.
It takes the average human body about an hour to get over the effects of one drink, Plum said, so unless you weigh very little, haven’t eaten or are on medication, you should be under the legal limit if you don’t have more than one drink per hour.
But even with a BAC as low as .02 percent, alcohol hurts one’s driving ability. The probability of a crash begins to increase significantly at .05 percent and climbs rapidly after .08 percent, according to a 2000 study by Zador, Krawchuk and Voas.
Virtually all drivers, even experienced drinkers, are significantly impaired at .08 BAC, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration studies from 2003.
Alcohol-related highway deaths nationwide have dropped during the past 20 years. While the number of fatalities from car accidents didn’t change much from 1982 to 2002, the percentage of those in which alcohol was involved dropped consistently, from 60 percent in 1982 to 41 percent in 2002.
For more information about MADD, call the Bay Area chapter toll-free at (800) 426-6233 or log onto www.madd.org. For more information about the Avoid the 13 event at Wal-Mart in Gilroy, call Gilroy police Community Service Officer Rachel Muñoz at 846-0524.
