The MADD Myth Of The Drunk Driving Holocaust
Driving a motor vehicle while shitfaced drunk is a bad idea. There is no disputing that. You should also avoid playing with firearms and power tools while intoxicated. This is simple common sense. However, did you know that more people die from choking on their food every year than are killed by drunk drivers? The true number of innocent people killed by drunk drivers is about the same as the number who drown annually in swimming pools, or die in ATV accidents. It is in fact a tiny number.
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) have cited an average of 25,000 alcohol-related traffic deaths per year. This figure is an intentional, self-serving, politically motivated lie. This can be seen in definitions and national numbers from NHTSA’s own publications.
The phrase “Alcohol-related” means that at least one of the participants in a traffic accident had consumed a “measurable amount” of alcohol, however small, or an alcohol container is found in any of the vehicles involved. If 30 people in a Greyhound Bus die in a crash, and one passenger has a liquor bottle in their luggage, this is called an alcohol-related crash! One empty beer can is “evidence”. This dishonest way of accounting produces the following logic: 98% of all fatal accidents are “sobriety-related” because a sober person is somehow involved. See how foolish and dishonest this is?
So, when you hear that “40% of fatal traffic accidents are alcohol related”, you are hearing a fictitious number.
Many accidents include passengers, the other driver, and pedestrians. All of these people must have zero alcohol intake in order to make the accident non-alcohol related. If any one of them has the smallest trace of alcohol, the whole accident is called “alcohol related”.
But wait, it gets worse. Lumped together in the term “alcohol related” is all drugs, including prescribed medication! If there is a prescription bottle for Xanax, a “roach” in the ashtray, a package of rolling papers, or anything else that can be construed as drug-related, the accident goes into the 40% category – even if the drugs are found on a passenger or pedestrian! So, since most elderly Americans are taking some type of prescription medication, their unfortunate traffic deaths become a significant part of these phony statistics.
So, the government statisticians start with defective definitions, deceitfully discard nondrinking drivers to create false high percentages, add drinking pedestrians to the mix, then for extra spice they add drug possessing drivers to their cauldron of fraudulent figures. The final mess is taken out of context then spoon-fed to the MADD mothers and the 6 o’clock news as if it were the Word of God when it’s actually propaganda to support severe laws that defy logic and the Bill of Rights.
NHTSA’s numbers are lies but the resultant brutal laws are very real. Laws such as the confiscation and sale of cars for drunk driving, “implied consent” laws, “sobriety checkpoints” and no right to a jury trial if arrested on federal land which is 21% of the total and growing.
Incidentally, the federal government owns more than half the land in the West. For example, it owns 83% of Nevada, 65% of Utah and 62% of Idaho and Alaska.
Here are the real numbers:
There are about 35,000 fatal traffic accidents each year in the United States. About 40,000 people die each year in these accidents. 60% of these accidents are single-vehicle. 80% of these are drivers or passengers, 5% are motorcyclists, and 15% are pedestrians. Fatal accidents comprise one half of one percent of reported traffic accidents.
Here’s the logical meltdown of the fictitious 40% figure:
More than 2/3 of traffic deaths are single vehicle crashes, so now we’re down to 13%.
Out of this 13%, 60% are accidents in which no person involved had a blood alcohol level over .10, so now we’re at 5%.
Over 1/3 of these cases are drug related, not alcohol related, which leaves us at 3%.
Half of these cases were caused by road conditions, weather, and sober drivers making errors, which puts us at 1.5%.
So, we can say that about 1.5% of traffic fatalities are caused by alcohol-impaired drivers.
The other 98.5% are caused by other things.
Instead of 25,000 the true number is about 600 innocent people killed annually by drunk drivers.
Of course it’s sad those innocent people died. But one might compare that number to the 2,000 children, most age 4 and younger, who die every year due to abuse or neglect. Or compare it to the 180,000 who die from negligence in hospitals per year. Those are all big numbers, but again, there are 280 million people living in the United States.
How drunk is drunk? USA Today states that a .08 blood alcohol content is “reached by a 120-pound woman who has 2 glasses of wine in 2 hours, or by a 160-pound man who has 3 drinks in 2 hours.” With attention focused on redefining “drunk,” people tend to forget that when the definition of drunk was dropped to .08, “impaired” was reduced to .05 – that’s a shot and a beer – or essentially “zero tolerance.” From .05 to .08, the police may arrest you at their own discretion and charge you with DUI. That means virtually everyone who stops at a bar is subject to arrest.
If these people constituted an actual threat of imminent danger to the community, it would be all to the good. But they don’t. They’re just regular folks like you and me. There is no evidence that persons below .12 constitute any danger at all.
A nationally publicized study in the February 1997 New England Journal of Medicine concluded that driving with a BAC of .10 is less hazardous than talking on a cell-phone while driving. That, however, is not the way the study and newspapers described the situation. Their words: “Cell phone talking is as dangerous as drunk driving!”
The only significant difference between talking on a car-phone or talking to a passenger in your car is that passengers can be more distracting. And yet, the study shows that phone-driving is equal to driving legally drunk. So how risky can “impaired driving” actually be? That’s clear evidence of how greatly the public has been misled about drinking and driving.
Some of you might remember that New Orleans for many years had drive-up Daquiri stands, where you could pull up and get mixed drinks. There was no law against drinking while driving in Louisiana until a few years ago. You could sip from a whiskey bottle with no fear of arrest.
So, was there carnage on the streets of New Orleans? Not at all. In fact, the numbers of “alcohol-related” accidents and deaths in Louisiana were right at the national average, and didn’t go down after the law was changed in the mid 1990s. Changing the laws in Louisiana did not save lives, although it did harm businesses and turn a whole group of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals.
And that is the real problem. When virtually everyone who drives away from a pub or restaurant is subject to criminal arrest – that’s a police state. When a car and a drivers license can be confiscated before trial, that’s a police state.
How did it all get so fucked up?
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded by a group of California women in 1980 after a 13 year old girl was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Since that time MADD has developed into one of the largest and most powerful political action/advocacy organizations in the U.S.
MADD’s activities were originally geared towards legitimate educational and victim support. MADD’s political focus was aimed at removing chronic alcoholic drunk drivers from the nation’s highways. Responsible social drinkers who drove home after a wedding or after good conversation with friends at the neighborhood pub were not targets of MADD’s efforts. Unfortunately, in recent years the organization and most of it’s local chapters has been taken over by ultra-conservative, anti-alcohol extremists who have adopted a political agenda that threatens the second coming of Prohibition.
If MADD’s attempts to criminalize all drinkers really saved lives it would be one thing. However, all available valid government data indicates that it does not.
Around 1985, MADD’s principal founder Candy Lightner left the organization she founded. Lightner cited a lack of focus on the real public safety issue, that of getting chronic alcoholic drunk drivers off the road. Lightner later became a lobbyist working against laws lowering the legal standard of drunk from .10 to .08.
Today MADD is a slick, multi-million dollar operation that in addition to hardsell mail and telephone soliciting, has a catalogue delivered to more than a million homes, selling the lies along with merchandise such as T-shirts, key chains, watches and many more MADD specialty items.
MADD was the focus of an NBC exposé in which Tom Brokaw looked at the “boiler room operation” of telephone solicitors that worked day and night collecting money and spouting lies for MADD. The company operating the boiler rooms kept 72 cents of every dollar raised of a reported $35 million in telephone contributions.
MADD isn’t the only organization feasting on concocted paranoia: Two years after MADD arrived on the scene, Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) was founded by a high school hockey coach named Robert Anastas. Eleven years after he founded it, Anastas retired from SADD, but not without abundant financial rewards: The SADD board of directors gave Anastas a retirement parachute worth more than one million dollars: He received a compensation package worth $316,398 upon his resignation; a $150,000 retirement package and a consulting contract that pays $195,000 annually for two years, $85,000 annually for the next five years, and $75,000 every year after that. It is a big business convincing America that alcohol causes a lot of people to die in horrible crashes. But there are many victims of the resulting legislation.
The number of people arrested in Kemah, Texas each year is greater than the number of innocent fatalities caused by drunk drivers in the entire United States.
To beef up revenues, police agencies unleash special squads to target “impaired” drivers. The suspect is shackled, his car is ransacked, he’s searched and tossed in the patrol car, then photographed, fingerprinted, thrown in a cage, and if he declined to submit to an alcohol test, he may be strapped down, have needles plunged into his body and have blood extracted from his veins. And then, even if that person is found Not Guilty, he will spends hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars for the repugnant experience. It’s tantamount to armed robbery, kidnapping, and assault and battery, to say the least.
Once arrested these otherwise law-abiding citizens are subjected to imprisonment; huge fines and court costs; costs of probation; unjust property forfeitures; made to attend political re-education meetings; psychological testing; involuntary forced labor; public humiliation; loss of driving privileges; loss of jobs; self esteem; and destruction of their families.
All of that happens because of lies – a witch hunt. “If one life can saved, then it’s worth it,” say the MADD mothers.
This scenario, in varying circumstances, happens about 2 million times every year in America.
Drinking and driving is far from being the #1 cause of accidents. Can you imagine if all the above misery were inflicted on stop sign runners and speeders? When drivers cruise through stop signs or try to beat yellow lights, those are acts that can cause serious accidents: Acts that unquestionably claim far more innocent victims per year than alcohol. If a cop spots you trying to beat a red light and writes a ticket, you willingly, albeit grudgingly, pay about $100. However, you will not be arrested, you will not lose thousands of dollars, you will not be carted off to jail, you will not lose your right to drive, you will not lose your car, you will not be placed on probation, you will not be forbidden to leave the state, you will not be forced to attend a behavior modification program, and your life will go on.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen enough to realize that the “war on drunk drivers” is not being waged solely against drinking drivers who are merely pawns in a much larger game: This is a war against alcohol.
Over the past decade, there’s been a reported gradual decline in “alcohol-related” fatal traffic accidents. MADD is taking credit, and many are mindlessly giving it to them. What they don’t mention is that there has been a gradual decline in ALL traffic deaths, not just “alcohol related”. I bet it has more to do with anti-lock brakes, safety inspections, and air bags. The only thing MADD can rightfully take credit for is the wanton vandalism of the Bill of Rights and for inflicting chaos upon the lives of millions of drivers who have harmed no one but have nevertheless been dragged through the criminal justice system while being denied their “inalienable rights” and watching their bank accounts wiped out and placed in the hands of those who wish to rob more powerless drivers.
During the past ten years, a lot of draconian laws have been passed. The drinking age has been raised from 18 to 21 (the kids are still drinking, but without any supervision – or they’ve turned to drugs). Have fatality rates due to drunk drivers really dropped? Nope. The general trend for all traffic deaths has gone down, due to air bags and anti-lock brakes. There is no indication that MADD’s agenda has accomplished anything. Their initial mission, to remove chronic alkies from the roads, was accomplished a long time ago. Since then they have become ineffective – but they have too much money and political clout to simply fade away. So they are now into preventing “date rape”, raising taxes, and supporting gun control laws – issues that have nothing to do with drunk driving.
Ten thousand years ago, the discovery of the intoxicating effects of fermented barley motivated the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The desire for beer caused a fundamental shift in human society. Our forefathers gathered at taverns where they hoisted a mug of ale and decided to fight for liberty. Drinking beer has been a benefit to society, and when they make beer drinkers into criminals (and they have already done so), you are no longer living in a free country.
Twenty four years ago there was a group of ladies who started a group to educate the public on the dangers of drunk driving. This has evolved into a political cause hell-bent on changing America’s social habits. They use flawed data and inflammatory rhetoric to achieve their goals and will continue to do so in the future. The biggest threat to this country today is social engineering, not the beer coming out of Milwaukee. If people choose not to drink then fine, but when they try to make criminals out of people who enjoy a legal and taxable product then it is time to question their credibility and that of those who support their efforts.
Drunk driving – the real thing – is bad. But the “cure” has now become far worse than the disease. …GATOR
