The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

Sobriety experienced not only a 12% drop in repeat drunken-driving arrests but also a 9% drop in domestic-violence arrests.

An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes."

The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

Well, you only get hit by it if you drive drunk (and get caught) once. (Maybe that's what you meant by "targeted".) Once someone has driven drunk, you can lower the hammer on the driving part (loss of car/license), or on the drinking part. It seems less destructive to lower the hammer on the drinking.

An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes."

I don't see how this affects the victimless crime argument.

It's exactly as if you made a law forbidding people from living or hanging out together. Domestic-violence arrests would plummet, but the victimless argument would still be valid: living with someone else is not the problem, violence is.

The difference is, alcohol has a direct causal effect with violence: making people violent or causing them to act on their violent tendencies.

Or people who are more violent tend to drink more?

Except the experiment in this article disproves that possible direction of causation. If violent people were more likely to drink more, then violence wouldn't have gone down, as it did, when the courts forcibly kept them from drinking.

With Prohibition in the United States, we discovered another interesting effect: heavy-handed restriction of alcohol lead to a surge in violent crimes and government corruption. It got so bad, that the original proponents of the 18th amendment joined with others to overturn it only 13 years later. It's worth pointing out how we've tried to "ban" alcoholism before.

There are two different issues: whether Prohibition's benefits outweighed it's costs, and whether regulation of alcohol use is fundamentally illegitimate. When people invoke the "victimless crime" trope, they are talking about the latter. But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

Put another way: why are we seemingly okay with banning alcohol use for people who have had a DUI but we wouldn't be okay with banning masturbation or gay sex even for convicted felons? Because the latter are truly victimless activities. Substance use is, in contrast, an activity that creates risk to the public but is hard to regulate without major side effects. So targeted bans in substance abuse could be effective while overcoming th enforcement side effects of a gener ban, and would be legitimate because substance use isn't a "victimless crime."

But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

That's an enormous assumption that is being made. What about the social deadweight loss from a person's freedom and personal agency being diminished through substance bans?

That's a fancy way of saying "its ok to beat women because personal freedom"? Or did I interpret your $2 words wrong?

It's almost as if you deliberately chose the least charitable interpretation humanly possible. I'd hate to see what other sophistry you'd employ.

Also I'm quite amused how the original post referenced domestic violence and you immediately jump to it beating women.

In any event, I was referring to the use of substances and the right to determine one's own destiny.

The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

You could say the same of prison sentences for alcohol-related offenses. Which is more invasive?

The idea that prisoners have no access to alcohol (among other things) does not seem particularly reasonable to me.

I see that perhaps I worded this in such a way that I should clarify. I'm trying to say that I believe that prisoners who want alcohol are able to obtain it in spite of the prohibitions on it.

Alcohol is especially associated with increased risk for violence. Other drugs, not so much.

Most violence related to illicit drugs is not caused by intoxication, but rather by fighting and stealing between drug dealers.

So there is good arguement that drug prohibition increases violence by creating a criminal black-market (where people turn to violence rather than police and laws to resolve disputes) and by encouraging alcohol use rather than use of safer, less violence-inducing drugs.

among my peer group, uber/lyft have done more to curb drunk driving than anything else. in fact i'm going to go ahead and say it's probably the only thing that has had any real impact, since nobody i know has ever gotten a DUI and i've seen some really risky shit go down.

scare tactics and huge fines (associated with pullovers and checkpoints which are super low probability events) just don't work, that's for sure. i know of people who literally drove drunk for YEARS until uber came along, then stopped entirely.

oh goodness yes

In my early twenties I would occasionally drive home “tipsy” — what felt like tipsy at the time; in retrospect, I was as drunk as a skunk. But there were no alternatives! I lived in a spread out western city, taxis were unheard of.

Threats and punishments don’t work on young people who have a psychological sense of invulnerability. The best way to curb drunk driving is through practical solutions that have immediate and obvious effectiveness.

All that said, I’m impressed with the psychology behind this program, and it’s nice to see policy that aims at curbing and solving destructive behavior instead of profiting off it in the form of fines.

But there were no alternatives!

Are you seriously suggesting you had no better alternative than to drive drunk?

There were at least three alternatives available: Don't drink, get a ride with someone sober, or walk/bike/etc.

No alternatives within the acceptable cost window from his perspective. Of course there are alternatives, sleep on the street, whatever. But those aren't real when making impaired decisions.

That's why you make the decision to not get impaired in the first place, when deciding not to drink because there's no safe way to get home if you do. "If I drink this alcohol, I will then drink even more, followed by a nontrivial chance of murdering someone while trying to get home" should not be considered a choice that's acceptable to get wrong.

I've gone out for a few beers with co-workers and found myself having had a few more than I meant to on a couple of occasions. It's entirely possible to end up in no shape to drive with absolutely no ill intent.

To argue "but you knew when you were drinking that 3rd beer!!..." is all well and good, but the point of going out is to enjoy your friends company and have fun, not carefully monitor your alcohol consumption. The lack of taxis, buses, trains, etc in many states is a major contributor to drunk driving.

Just don’t drink at all when you drive? I don’t know why you think it acceptable to drink anything at all before driving.

I think it’s unacceptable for me to drink anything at all when I plan on driving. That way I have never ever been in a situation where I had to drive while being drunk. It’s a quite simple heuristic …

There is so much more to this experiment than drunk driving!

It shows that modest, swift, carefully metered punishment is a lot more effective than the more traditional slow, but heavy punishment.

This is a big deal, because it shows a promising path to dramatically reduce the US prison population. Don't mind the drunk driving, think about all of the crimes out there, and all of the people who got a hammer dropped on them.

As a parent of a difficult child, this is not at all surprising.

What little evidenced-based parenting advice is out there[1] suggests the same thing: taken individually, immediate minor punishments are as effective as major punishments. The big advantage comes with the fact that the parent can be more consistent as minor punishments are typically less work than large ones. Consistent annoyances are better at provoking change than occasional calamity.

1: If you thought the story for evidence-based medicine was bad, just skim through the parenting books at a book store.

It's not the novelty of this approach that excites me, it's the evidence of it working so well.

We can take this data to a legislature and lobby for new treatment plans. A parent's hunch will not carry the same weight.

Evidence-based politics is even less popular than evidence-based medicine.

I think your point is too blunt in its cynicism, it's not too useful this way.

Evidence is currency, and so are demagoguery, posturing, campaign money, endorsements, promises, actual political platform, public sentiments, etc. Sadly, evidence does not trump all else. Luckily, even a modest amount of evidence currency can tip the scales of the outcome.

I would like to draw your attention to a media campaign waged in recent month by forces unknown to reduce harshness of the US criminal justice system. It's pretty much every week that I get to read an article about in the New York Times, and they all refer to some sort of research being released, or a small investigation into a particular injustice. Now we get this article from the Wall Street Journal. You know it's on when both the NYT and the WSJ converge on something. The tide is turning rapidly away from "Tough On Crime" to "Measured Response", and this evidence will be a contributing factor in this sea-change.

Do you have a link or book about this to share for a new parent?

Most of my research has been for dealing with kids that have trauma backgrounds, and there are different things you do there.

I will say that I've found the Love & Logic series less terrible than most of the mainstream stuff, and you'll likely be able to find a local class, which (assuming you're not a single parent) can be huge on getting you on the same page with your significant-other. That made a big difference for me, as my wife and I were raised very differently.

A few snippets of advice:

* Operant Conditioning[2] works both ways: your child's behavior will affect you, and you will subconsciously avoid things that are distressing to you. Not taking this into account can cause a lot of problems.

* One thing at a time. e.g. don't potty train and teach table manners at the same time. Partly because it's harder on the kids, but mainly to prevent burnout for the parents.

* Focus primarily on having a positive relationship (versus a lot of training & discipline) with kids under about 2. It seems likely that Martha Sears[1] went overboard, but there is definitely some phenomena like "attachment." (Also, Attachment Parenting, Attachment therapy and Attachment-based therapy are all different things, and the terminology is not always agreed upon)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_parenting

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

Yes children are experts at manipulating their parents. When you think about it they are on average as smart as their parents, but they have the advantage that their full time job is getting their parent to do what they want. Parents really don’t stand a chance.

Parents ar so much more experienced though. Reverse psychology works well even into the early teen years. How many parents fall for blatant reverse psychology. That's just one example of many techniques. Others include conditioning, reinforcement, outright education.

Not until you have a few :)

Most parents start out not really knowing much about the day to day details of being a parent. Your children learn really quickly how to achieve their aims.

As a parent the thing you do learn is to choose your battles. This is the cause of the eldest's lament that their parents were so much stricter with them than their younger siblings.

I've had a few ;) My kids can outsmart me sure, but I outsmart them much more easily than they, me.

The result here isn't what you said:

taken individually, immediate minor punishments are as effective as major punishments

The result here is that frequent minor punishments are 72% more effective than infrequent major punishments (see the article on Hawaii's 5 year study of this approach linked to by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064425).

If I'm understanding right, grandparent isn't saying "effectiveness(minor, frequent) == effectiveness(major, infrequent)"; they're saying "effectiveness(minor) == effectiveness(major) && effectiveness(frequent) > effectiveness(infrequent)".

It shows that modest, swift, carefully metered punishment is a lot more effective than the more traditional slow, but heavy punishment.

I'd be very nervous about extending this beyond drunk driving.

With DUIs, breathalyzers are essentially "proof" of the crime (to the extent that there is ever incontrovertible proof for any crime). And if you refuse a breathalyzer, you've violated the implied consent law, so there's no ambiguity there either. You may be able to get off on a technicality, but it's rather difficult to abuse this, short of a police officer falsifying breathalyzer results outright.

But for most other crimes, there's a lot of ambiguity, which is why we have a separation between LEOs and the court system. I'm already uncomfortable with the level of unchecked power that LEOs (and non-LEOs, like the TSA) have today. I really don't want them to have any more leeway with detention of civilians.

In a perfect world if you extended this beyond DUI the punishments given out would be reduced. Especially, the punishments that happen after you serve your time. One of my biggest problems with criminal justice system is the way the ex-cons are dogged by their mistakes for the rest of their life. I understand the interest an employer (or in the worst of cases a neighbor) might have in knowing that about a person but... somehow it seems deeply unfair.

I understand the interest an employer (or in the worst of cases a neighbor) might have in knowing that about a person but... somehow it seems deeply unfair.

It is unfair if you believe that the jail is supposed to rehabilitate people. It seems to me that people believe it in theory but don't believe it in practice.

>This is a big deal, because it shows a promising path to dramatically reduce the US prison population. Don't mind the drunk driving, think about all of the crimes out there, and all of the people who got a hammer dropped on them.

I hate to be that guy, but the US prison population is large because certain powerful interests want it to be large. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. And it definitely won't change as a result of a study about drunk driving.

That said, it's still an interesting study. Like many people, I've lost a friend in an accident involving a drunk driver, so the subject is important to me.

It shows that modest, swift, carefully metered punishment is a lot more effective than the more traditional slow, but heavy punishment.

I thought we basically already knew that? I thought we had already shown in studies that swiftness & certainty of punishment are more effective deterrents than severity.

That is not a new idea. It's long been known that punishments are dramatically more effective if they are swift and certain. But, if the solution to crime is simply to catch every criminal immediately after they commit their crime, the question is how will you do that?

The real interesting part of this was the sobriety program. They found a way to identify bad habits at a relatively low cost. How to extend that model to other crimes is unclear. Parole basically exists for that purpose already, so the question is how it can be made more effective.

I just don't really see a clear path to general crime reduction here.

What would be the equivalent for cellphone use? Because the biggest threat for me while biking is not drunk drivers but those texting and fiddling with their phones.

The problem with this is mostly spotting people doing it, and then taking action against them. When you have N cops, versus a thousand plus times as many drivers, spotting and pulling over the people doing it becomes an extremely laborious process.

There are three options that can be used alone or together.

1) Technology solution. Put digital eyes around the area of the steering wheel or otherwise pointing at the driver. Report drivers that frequently use a phone while driving. We can trivially build a phone identifier for a car today, given the drastic improvements in recognition technology. We could also easily judge drivers by their poor attentiveness to the road. This approach will freak people out in regards to being nanny state invasive.

2) Community shaming, education programs. This was half the battle with getting people to use seat belts regularly.

3) Traditional police enforcement. Cops start pulling people over for it more frequently, and hitting them with on the spot $100, $200, $500 fines. Perhaps it increases with each offense within a certain amount of time. The problem here is, the radical majority of people will simply slip through the enforcement cracks and not be caught. It would also be open to easy abuse, cops stuffing the budget with lots of fines. People see seat belts as a life saving device for the most part, so voluntary compliance mostly worked, but I'd wager most people do not see their phone habits as potentially life threatening. That requires greater disincentives to reach the same compliance, or a vastly larger shaming & education project.

How about this:

If you're caught cell-driving, you either pay a large fine, say $750, or you submit to a program that bans talking while moving faster than 5mph for the next two months. The cell carrier will monitor the ban and issue citations by SMS.

So if you opt into this program, and then you're driving down the road, start talking on the cell phone, and then 30 seconds later BANG! you get a text message: "That call was $75 payable to the city hall before the end of the day". Yeah, you can't talk on the bus and stuff, but that's the "punishment" part for ya.

It's worth a try, I think.

The trick with using technology to assess "driving while texting" is that texters are often the passengers in the car. Waze tries to deal with moving typers by having an alert that pops up thatsays (roughly), "You can't enter text while moving" - but has a button that says, "It's ok, I'm a passenger."

The trick with a $75 fine for texting while moving is passengers. If you're willing to ban texting entirely while moving though, using technology to assess small fines could work!

I'm not proposing trying to figure out who is driving and who is riding. Once a person got caught breaking the law, he can't use his phone while moving; passenger or driver is not important at this point.

The key is to training new habit and making it stick, according to the article, is to make punishment moderate, certain, and immediate. We can't do that across the board due to the limitations of technology, legitimate use, privacy concerns, presumption of innocence and so on. But we sure can do that to those who broke the law, especially when they opt into it.

You can't fix this with penalties & frankly anyone that says so is deluded.

Its a question of custom/culture. You need peer pressure that effectively says "only shtheads endanger others by climbing behind the wheel drunk" (forgive the language). That is what has an impact on the target audience...not fines (big/small/immediate/delay...)

I agree. Take Wisconsin as an example. The culture here is heavily drinking based. If you haven't visited, you won't understand. Meeting friends/family/coworkers/strangers? At a bar/pub. 7 days a week. Completely normal. If you're socializing there's probably a beer in your hand. Even coffee shops have beer on tap and whiskey/scotch by the dram.

We have 3043 bars for a population of 5,664,893. California has 3100 bars for a population of 36,969,200.

The states with the highest ratio are N Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Nebraska... Do you see the trend? We have a large % of the population without a lot of money.

Now, what do we lack? Reliable and cheap public transportation. I can drink piss beer all night on $20 but you want me to take a cab ride for $30 a few miles across town? No way. Not a chance people will voluntarily blow their drinking money on a taxi. At least Uber can be cheaper, but it's not prevalent or reliable.

Trolly/tram/train/buses to get quickly around town 24/7 for dirt cheap? You bet people would use them. But you've only solved the issue for a few major metropolitan areas; it's not feasible anywhere else. The rest of the state is rurual/farmland. After a long day of work on the farm you want nothing more than to throw back some cold ones and bullshit with neighbors at the bar. And then you'll drive home drunk, get up for chores, and start again. The cycle repeats.

I'm not condoning it. I've had many friends and family members have to deal with the consequences of their actions. But I can understand their plight. It's unfortunate.

Public shaming of drinking culture might be the only way to alter the behavior.

This is what's broken about people's ability to assess risk and address crime:

" the problem still costs some 10,000 Americans their lives each year."

Imagine if terrorist bombings were killing the same number of people each year. Maybe a plane load every month or two. Would we ask the psychologists what might be a more effective way of deterring people from bombing things? Banning them from flying after they were caught carrying explosives through the airport doesn't seem to be working well enough.

That was my thought as well. Just to drive the point home:

costs some 10,000 Americans their lives each year

with

Maybe a plane load every month or two.

Would have to be 100 planes/year (at ~100 people/plan)! Imagine if you had 8 plane crashes/month due to drunk pilots!

Excuse my math problem :P It seems to me that these factors can make people much more concerned about a danger:

A) Few but large scale killings - eg 100 planes of 100 people each seems worse than 10,000 cars of 1 person each.

B) A single identifiable group of outsiders that can be blamed. Most people drink so drinkers aren't outsiders.

But this last factor surprisingly doesn't seem to be a worry, as evidenced by people's willingness to drive, despite the fact that it sounds like it should induce terror:

C) Random sudden death without warning.

I agree. Also, I think the amount of input you have into an activity is also somewhat inversely proportional to the shock when the accident happens.

People actively drive the car, so they may think "I have a chance to affect the outcome", whereas being a plane passenger is basically vegetating for X hours in a very uncomfortable seat, and there is no way you can actively influence the outcome in a positive way.

I always find it interesting how many people automatically agree drunk driving should be a crime. Drunk driving per se is victimless- only when life or property are injured is there a victim, and there are already crimes/legal remedies in place for those cases.

Consider the case where a drunk driver gets home safely while obeying all traffic laws. Or even the case where a drunk driver is swerving- she can already be pulled over under a reckless driving statute.

I have argued this many times, but it usually gets heated on the internet where someone undoubtably knows someone who died from a drunk driver. That said I honestly believe the far and vast majority of drunk driving is victimless, and probably less dangerous than distracted driving.

I think the difference between distracted driving and drunk driving is the foreknowledge of impairment, and intentional increase of danger to the public. As such, in many states driving while texting or on the phone without a hands-free system are also illegal. The reasoned decision that someone's convenience is above the safety of the public is what I see as the problem here (and of course if someone isn't sober enough to make a reasoned decision about that, then I definitely don't think they have any place operating a piece of heavy equipment).

foreknowledge of impairment, and intentional increase of danger to the public.

That sounds to me exactly like distracted driving.

Yes, as in using a phone or being subject to a perception altering substance, as I stated. But you can also become distracted while driving without the ability to quickly stop driving. This could be the fault of the driver (paying attention to irrelevant things), or out of their control (conditions warrant splitting your attention between the road in front of you an another circumstance you have no control over). We don't punish these because we person is either not willfully causing the situation, or there is no way to determine if their behavior contributed.

Another way to think of it is that you aren't punished for drunk driving, but for breaking the law, and the law has been decided by determining that drunken driving provides unacceptable risk overall. Whether individually a person would have caused harm is irrelevant, we create a enforce laws for the good of all, and without enforcement, or selective enforcement without due process, we have a slew of other problems.

You were remarking on the difference between distracted driving and drunk driving. I was replying that your stated difference did not sound like a difference at all.

Given the context of the surrounding discussion, I didn't think anyone was talking about situations of accidental distraction while driving.

I was trying to additionally distinguish between accidental and intentional distracted driving, because I find that when a distinction can be made like that but it isn't made clear, people end up talking past each other about slightly different things but with the same name.

I was a bit unclear in what I was doing though.

Generally when you know someone who has died because of the choices of someone else it impacts how you view those choices.

I was in physical therapy next to someone who wasn't going to walk again because of a chronic drunk driver.

Distracted driving / texting while driving should be punished on the same level as drunk driving IMHO. It's really dangerous and until it's actively enforced people are going to get hurt often.

I ride my bike to work and it is so dangerous because of people texting. I've seen several accidents happen because one driver is texting and the one in front of them has to stop.

If your commute is anything like London its the HGV (large trucks) vehicles that are the killers not texting while driving.

90% or so of the fatalities in london are caused by cyclists undertaking HGV's who turn into them.

That's only the number of fatalities. A large number of serious injury occurs across a wider range of vehicles than just HGV's. I'd say the majority are probably down to poor driving judgement, and a modest number are due to distractions. A lot of these HGV injuries are to do with bad road design and poor cyclist judgement - pulling along side the left-hand side of a HGV while it's stationery into both the drivers blind spot and being unable to see the vehicles indicators. A few of the fatalities I know of were pretty unnecessary, since there are more than adequate cycle paths to skip around the dangerous sections of road. The Elephant and Castle roundabout is particularly notorious, but is surrounded by much safer cycle paths. Despite this, a large majority of cyclists stick to the highly dangerous road, and probably the same majority that decide to risk running red lights. (I am a cyclist, so I'm not starting a cyclist vs driver debate)

That's hilarious logic. The HGV runs someone over due to poor vision, and it's that persons fault?

That must be what people mean with the whole spraying bullets into a crowd thing. It's a victimless crime, except for the poor idiot that just had to lean into one bullet.

The HGV pulls up to a traffic lighted junction. The driver is indicating to turn left. The traffic lights are currently red, and so the driver is stopped.

A cyclist undertakes the HGV - passes on the left. The cyclist is attempting to reach the cyclists junction box.

While making this manouver the traffic lights change from red to red-amber and then green. The HGV driver checks the mirrors but does not see the cyclist (who is in the HGV blindspot) and pulls off, turning left, crushing and killing the cyclist who is trapped between the HGV and the curb.

I've tried to word this neutrally. It's a tragic situation and there's learning for cyclists and HGV vehicles, and road designers here.

So a design fault of his vehicle made the driver unable to follow the rules of the road and properly check for the presence of other road users. As a result, he kills someone.

This isn't a tragic situation. It's a probable situation, and we know the root cause. It's the driver, of course, since the burden of lawfully operating his vehicle at all times falls on him, no matter the particularities. And it's the vehicle maker, because clearly the HGV isn't fit for traffic.

Kudos for stating a taboo or at least unpopular opinion in a reasoned manner. I do think that drunk driving should be a crime, because on balance I expect making it so does more good than harm. There are certainly people who choose not to drive when intoxicated for no other reason than fear of being caught and punished. That said, I agree with aspects of your point: it should certainly be a greater crime to be swerving around the road while intoxicated than to simply blow slightly over the limit on a breathalyzer with no other symptoms, and while it could already be charged as multiple offenses, I'm not sure that that's often done in practice. Also, I tend to lean against "zero tolerance" laws, where any BAC whatsoever is a crime.

Heck, you could even argue that a particularly good driver and/or someone with a high alcohol tolerance may be safer even when impaired than some drivers are unimpaired; perhaps then the oldschool impairment tests - walk in a line, touch your nose, etc., are fairer than the theoretically more impartial breathalyzer. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it seems like a reasonable argument at least.

Your comment made me think of cops pulling over a driver and sticking them in a VR driving sim for a few minutes to test their response time and motor control. Implausible, sure, and we'll probably have autonomous cars before it can become a reality... but it would be interesting to test for actual driving impairment rather than a proxy like a breathalyzer (or even walking in a straight line).

It would also give police an opportunity to remove other dangerous drivers from the road, e.g. certain elderly or sleep-deprived drivers.

This wouldn't work. Motor control isn't the only (or most significant) problem with drunk driving. It's the combination with impaired judgement/attentiveness that can be so deadly.

If you're in a VR driving sim with a cop standing next to you, you're going to pay attention and (virtually) drive, constantly paying attention to the speedometer and road signs. Rather than flipping through stations while turning around to tell a joke to the people in the back seat. Or just zoning out on a routine drive and not realizing you're 40 over.

It's why people often say "I'm a better driver when I'm drunk" -- not true for sloppy drunk, but probably true for slightly drunk because the fear of DUI causes them to intently focus when otherwise they would be on auto-pilot not devoting their full attention to the operation of a deadly machine.

People think they drive better when slightly drunk because they have impaired senses and do not notice potentially hazardous conditions that they luckily avoid.

While I agree that all laws should be questioned your example here misses the point.

When intoxicated with alcohol your reaction times and concentration level are slowed. You may obey all road rules perfectly on your normal drive home when drunk, but one night something may be a bit different - a train crossing that isn't normally used, an inattentive driver who pulls out slightly two late, or a pedestrian who crosses a bit slower than most people - and you're now in an accident that would have been avoided had you been sober and had your normal reaction and reasoning skills.

It's not the stereotypical swerving red-light-running drunk driver that we target with drink-driving laws, as you've mentioned that's already covered by dangerous driving laws.

When young/old/stupid/tired your reaction times and concentration level are slowed. But there are no laws against those things (unless you're actually driving badly).

Drunk driving causes 10,000 deaths/year according to the article. How many are caused by the factors you mention? Doubtless some, but it's clearly not our top priority, especially given that it's much easier to give someone a breathalyzer test than to check for "stupidity" or "tiredness".

Shooting at people is victimless- only when the bullets actually hit people is there a victim, and there are already crimes/legal remedies in place for that.

Consider the case where a shooter sprays bullets in a crowded building wildly, but no one is actually hit.

Rightly or wrongly, drunk driving is considered endangerment of others.

endangerment comprises several types of crimes involving conduct that is wrongful and reckless or wanton, and likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm to another person.

Similar to crimes like attempted murder, we do not allow endangerment even though it may be the case that no one was hurt, because Person A took a high risk with Person B's life and we do not consider that acceptable.

That's not what "victimless" means. Victimless means no one is harmed, not even statistically, in consensually. Getting high at home, or having consensual sex, are victimless crimes.

Be careful about the victimless label. Just because an individual action does not cause harm does not mean that it should not be punished as if it had. The act is the same. Whether or not someone is physically injured is largely a matter of luck. It would be horrific if punishments were handed out on that basis alone.

A long time ago I read a statement from a judge sentencing two defendants for felony murder. They both shot and a man was dead, but there was a debate as to which bullet actually killed. "The only difference between the two was aim, and I am not going to let one off for being the poorer shot."

The more appropriate word for such laws are "regulatory crimes". They are meant to regulate behavior to prevent or reduce an evil that does not occur in all cases. This covers everything from practicing medicine without a license to drug possession, neither of which necessarily cause a physical harm in every case.

And yet, punishing people who haven't hurt anyone seems far worse the crime. Victim-less isn't a label, it's a statement of fact that no one was hurt and thus cannot claim injury; there should be no such crimes. "Regulatory crime" is way of putting a soft label on a terrible practice, punishing the innocent just because something "might" have happened.

What you call luck, others call knowing their limits.

I know you may not mean this literally, but taken at face value, you're saying even attempted murder (assuming you don't end up harming your intended victim) shouldn't be a crime. I would actually argue that an attempted murder should be considered almost as great, if not as great, a crime as one that succeeded. Similarly for most crimes, in my opinion the intent is at least as important as the act itself.

Basically just because someone hasn't been hurt, it doesn't mean that a behaviour is acceptable in society.

Nobody gets into a car drunk with the intention of harming someone else. With attempted murder there is clear intent to do harm. A better comparison would be to manslaughter - if you do something dangerous which leads to the accidental death of somebody you are punished. The question would be, if you do something dangerous and nobody happens to be hurt, should you still be punished? Should "attempted manslaughter" be a thing?

No, but they do get into the car reckless as to harming someone else, which is a culpable state of mind as well. E.g. You shoot a gun into the air in downtown Chicago and the bullet happens not to kill anyone on the way back down. You didn't mean to kill any body, but it certainly was criminally reckless.

Besides that, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Why is manslaughter different than murder? The only difference is the intent--the end result is the same (someone's dead). When the state of mind is the same, why should luck in the outcome change the punishment?

No, but they do get into the car reckless as to harming someone else

False, you can be charged with DUI while perfectly sober; DUI applies to far more than alcohol.

Why is manslaughter different than murder?

Manslaughter means accidental, murder means on purpose; if you don't see the difference, perhaps you need to think about that a bit harder.

When the state of mind is the same, why should luck in the outcome change the punishment?

If you don't see the difference between an accident and doing something on purpose as requiring different punishment, well then you just fundamentally disagree with about all of mankind. If your car tire blows and you hit another car and kill someone through no fault of your own, apparently you think that's an equal crime to murder. Really... c'mon... really?

YSK 'rayiner is a lawyer.

> When the state of mind is the same, why should luck in the outcome change the punishment?

If you don't see the difference between an accident and doing something on purpose as requiring different punishment, well then you just fundamentally disagree with about all of mankind. If your car tire blows and you hit another car and kill someone through no fault of your own, apparently you think that's an equal crime to murder. Really... c'mon... really?

You miss the question here.

If I am driving my car and I take y attetion off the road for a moment to adjust my car radio, and then plough into another car...

1) ... And kill the driver of that other car

2) ... And injure, but don't kill the other driver

Why should y punishment for (1) be more severe than for (2)? My intent was the same, my poor behaviour was the same. Perhaps the difference between causing death and not causing death is the quality of the crashed driver's car.

Murder requires intent to kill. Man-slaughter also requires intent to cause harm. That's why there are seperate laws for vehicular death - causing death by dangerous driving or vehicular manslaughter. It's hard to meet the burden of proof required by murder or manslaughter.

(assuming you don't end up harming your intended victim) > I would actually argue that an attempted murder should be considered almost as great, if not as great, a crime as one that succeeded.

You are implicitly saying that it does harm. Indeed, it does harm the psych, which might lead to physical harm in the long run.

It would harm my psyche if I thought everyone on the road has been drinking. I actively avoid it during times when it is in fact more likely (New Years eve etc). People who think they know their limits kill people all the time.

People who think they know their limits kill people all the time.

So do people who are tired, or old, or stressed, or any other number of reasons. People kill people all the time, singling out one group and basically charging them with pre-crimes is not just. The world is a dangerous place, jailing people so your "psyche" feels good is not just. The world is dangerous, how about you accept that and act accordingly rather than supporting jailing those who haven't hurt anyone.

Perhaps, but drinking and driving is quite a bit more preventable than being stressed. Certainly people get distracted and accidents happen, but purposely driving impaired is in fact something different.

That being said, generally speaking, a drunk driver who happens to not do anything wrong on the road is extremely unlikely to have any legal issues. Mostly they are going to have problems when they start swerving or exhibiting signs of being impaired. A tired driver who is swerving wildly is also likely to get pulled over.

So you're suggesting that people be allowed, for example, to practice medicine without a license right up to the point that they kill someone through incompetence?

You bring up a great point. I'd argue that, instead of being required to go to medical school, you should be tested on the merits.

If you meet the objective bar (no lawyer pun intended, though see California's attempt at doing this for the legal profession), then yes, you should be able to practice even without a multi-year degree.

One could consider med school to be a series of tests on the merits, including the subsequent internship/residency and licensing standards.

It's just not possible to study at home and be educated enough to be a doctor. You need huge amounts of expensive resources (cadavers, equipment, live patients, etc.)

This makes more sense for professions that are "all books", so to say. E.g. law, where all you really need is a slightly longer test (or not even that).

But this makes no sense for medical school, which teaches a lot that would be extremely difficult to test directly. Often the direct test would basically amount to going to medical school for some non-trivial amount of time anyways.

Law is not all books. There is something physical about law school. It may not be as physical as med school, but the three-year process of getting the JD is more than a pile of textbooks. Interaction with students and professors, structured or not, is as important as the reading. It changes people. By third year you realize exactly how vast the practice is and no longer focus on the gritty aspects of constitutional debate.

Yes actually, if someone freely chooses to visit an unlicensed medical practitioner, perhaps because it's all they can afford, that should be legal as long no fraud is being committed. Perhaps you like the nanny state making all your decisions for you, I do not.

But isn't swerving is victimless too? And running a red light or speeding or driving against traffic on the freeway?

If we only punish people for behavior that results in injury or damage then you're relying on each and every driver to correctly assess the risks of their behavior. People are notoriously bad at doing that, so any punishment will be ineffective as a deterrent.

Yes indeed! For some kind of evidence towards this, try walking on the streets of a city where running red lights, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road are reasonably common. (I'm not joking - where I live, this /is/ common.)

It's a victimless crime, all right - but only until the next victim.

I'd argue it's not. People breaking traffic rules erode my ability to travel. If they were to regularly speed through red lights, I'd have to stop at green lights to watch for them. I have a right to travel through on a green light, but they'd take that from me.

We need to obey the rules of the road so other drivers can reason about our behaviour. We could have no rules, but it would be much less efficient. This is the prisoner's dilemma and the law enforces cooperation.

True, you don't have to be killed or maimed to be a "victim".

Sobriety is one of the conditions of the social contract you sign (literally, on your license application) in exchange for access to society's roads.

Jail time is not really appropriate. Really, you should just lose access to public roads. But license revocation is adulthood revocation for all but the privileged few in SF, NYC, and maybe Chicago. In most of this country you can't get groceries or primary medical care without driving, and you certainly can't hold a job or provide a normal life for your children. A five-figure fine and even a month or two in jail is many times less severe than permanent loss of driving privileges; that's life-destroying (pretty much your only option is to drop everything and move to a high-cost-of-living area of a high-cost-of-living city to get adequate public transit coverage).

So don't drive drunk.

Oh look, problem solved.

license revocation is adulthood revocation for all but the privileged few in SF, NYC, and maybe Chicago

This is almost certainly true in America, but keep in mind that some other societies view driving somewhat differently. America represents less than one twentieth of the world's population. In major European cities, at least, car ownership seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

It's not really true in America, either. The (small) European cities I've lived in have far better transit than even major US cities, but any American city with a "greater metro area" population in the millions will have enough public transit that you can survive without a car and without living in an extremely costly area.

It requires some walking and biking, and some employment options do disappear. But most of those employment options are recoverable because the salaries (e.g. at suburban office parks) pay well enough to cover the cost of a cab from the nearest bus stop to the office every morning.

IME the lack of public will to walk a half mile, ride a bike in the rain, or wait ten minutes at a bus stop is by far the greatest barrier to use of public transit in America.

Using the word "salary", and talking about paying cabs to drive to buses shows that you ignoring the reality of a huge segment of the working population, who work hourly, and have childcare needs.

Car ownership rates in European countries are not vastly lower than in the US. In some, it's actually higher. On average the rate is a bit lower, but it's not anywhere close to "the exception rather than the rule."

Sobriety is one of the conditions of the social contract you sign (literally, on your license application) in exchange for access to society's roads.

Travel via the common means is a right, not a privileged; such laws are unjust. That driving requires you make such promises is absurd.

Travel via the common means is a right, not a privilege

Rights aren't unconditional.

That driving requires you make such promises is absurd.

Here's why driving requires you to make these types of promises:

http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_...

Rights aren't unconditional.

Conditions would make them privileges.

Here's why driving requires you to make these types of promises

Not relevant, that it's dangerous doesn't change my opinion that it's absurd.

Conditions would make them privileges.

This is a common misunderstanding.

Rights are unconditional is the sense that they apply to everyone equally. But almost all are conditional in the sense that they don't give carte blanc permission without exception.

It might help to think of rights like axioms. (A & (A -> B)) -> B is true unconditionally. It is an axiom. But it is also conditional. It is universally true, and yet, B is not universally true.

Nearly all rights we have are unconditionally conditional in this way. They always apply to everyone (universally), but that doesn't mean there aren't conditions (that get applied universally).

For instance, being convicted of murder triggers conditions on most of the rights we have as citizens. Not all of them, but most.

Privileges are different from rights because they don't have to apply to each person equally in the way rights do. The two are separated by the fact that rights are extended universally and privileges aren't, not by the presence or absence of conditions.

Yes, I'm aware of that, I'm disagreeing with it as a matter of principle. Just because things are a certain way doesn't require that I accept it. Driving should not require a license and an annual fee to the state; the conditions we've accepted our on rights have destroyed many of our once long held freedoms. It didn't require a license to ride a horse or drive a buggy, licenses are just another way for the state to make money and restrict my right to travel via the common means of the day.

Beyond that, you understand what I'm saying, so rather than try to redefine what I mean when I use a word, how about just understanding my point. We're not in court, I don't need a lesson on the legal meaning of the word right.

you understand what I'm saying

Obviously, I apparently did not.

Therefore:

I'm disagreeing with it as a matter of principle.

Please don't do that. Redefining words for yourself and then using your secret meanings in discussions is both irritating (because it wastes other commenter's time) and comes off as arrogant (because it demonstrates a clear disregard for other's time and a willful unwillingness to communicate effectively).

If you know something is a Right in the conventional sense even though it has conditions attached, state that you disagree with those conditions. Don't call it "not a right" to make a point. Doing so derails the conversation and wastes other's time.

licenses are just another way for the state to make money and restrict my right to travel via the common means of the day.

That's obviously not true. You really think your $20 license fee pays for... anything? It's probably not even offsetting the cost of the licensing regime.

And restricting your travel obviously is not the goal of a driver's license. Where did you even get that idea?

"The State" doesn't require licensing because it wants to screw you out of money or keep you down. We, the people, require licensing because driving is dangerous and we don't want idiots to kill us.

Driving should not require a license and an annual fee to the state

Of course, assuming you live in a democracy, you're free to try to change that.

I think you'll find this an impossible reform because given the danger of driving, licensing is an extremely important first step toward making roads safer.

It didn't require a license to ride a horse or drive a buggy

Yeah, right, because horses and buggies didn't kill millions of people a year.

As an aside, in almost every state you can still ride horses on most public roads without a license.

It didn't require a license to ride a horse or drive a buggy,

Horses were taxed. Carriages were taxed.

http://www.genguide.co.uk/source/taxes-miscellaneous/177/

Etc.

Driving is not the same as traveling . being a passenger is a right.

So, you raise an interesting point. I have two follow-up questions.

Firstly, I'm not sure what "victimless" means exactly, and I think you may be taking it too literally. As people in the many comments below have pointed out, there are plenty of crimes which are "victimless", e.g. taking a machine gun and "spraying" a crowd of people with bullets, but failing to hit anyone. Is this a "victimless" crime? At what point do we decide to set the bar?

Come to think of it, there are charges of "reckless endangerment", where someone it can be a crime to do something which endangers other people in a reckless manner. Drunk driving certainly falls under those, so I'd say that drunk driving laws are simply enhancements of "reckless endangerment" laws, providing more specific context.

Secondly, we as a society will often choose to make our laws based on certain factors, like what an average citizen knows For example, driving under the influence causes a variety of physical changes that are not obvious and not known by every single driver, e.g. slower response times. These are things that a reasonable driver might not even realise are impacting them, and might not feel when they are partially drunk. But we, as a society that has done scientific tests, know that these effects always happen. In this case, it makes sense to block actions that we know are harmful.

Firstly, I'm not sure what "victimless" means exactly, and I think you may be taking it too literally. As people in the many comments below have pointed out, there are plenty of crimes which are "victimless", e.g. taking a machine gun and "spraying" a crowd of people with bullets, but failing to hit anyone. Is this a "victimless" crime?

You've just terrorized a crowd of people, that's hardly victim-less; plenty of people there to complain about direct harm you've caused them, perhaps a few who will suffer years of PTSD. Plenty of lawsuits about to happen, victims by definition.

At what point do we decide to set the bar?

If no one is aware enough to try and sue you, then you haven't hurt them, and thus your action is by definition victimless.

You seem to think DUI means alcohol only, it's a bigger issue than that and it's an absurd law that can get you in trouble literally days after you've been sober because it applies to all substances, not just alcohol. We have several states now with legal recreational marijuana, think about that. Many things people do while driving are far more influential on their response times than being "intoxicated", being tired is far more dangerous, being old is far worse on response times. DUI laws are unjust.

What's really telling to me is that in my state, you can even be arrested for sleeping one off in your car instead of being on the road. That says something to me about the purpose of the law. It suggests that its main purpose is to punish you for drinking, but that it has a side effect of encouraging you not to drive.

You're still in charge ofthe vehicle even if you're not driving it.

Plenty of drunk people have a nap, wake up a few hours later and think they're not drunk and drive, even though they still are drunk.

In my opinion, drunk driving is way over-regulated.

I understand that there's a limit - a point at which driving drunk is truly dangerous, and statistically obvious. But, I live in northern Virginia where drunk driving is a normality. I live in a culture of drunkenness, where the happy hour is the norm. I live in an overdrawn culture of wineries, breweries, and distilleries. There are wine and beer festivals seemingly every weekend. Yet, it's rarely the casual drunk who winds up in accidents (probably of skill at driving drunk). Yet, I see news of regular fatal accidents of those aggressive drivers who must get to work or home faster than average.