Driving Drunk
It’s barely the start of the festive season and the tragedies caused by drunk drivers are increasing. Terence Pillay weighs in on the issue.
Driving drunk is a scourge on our society because it’s not a victimless crime. And research has shown that if you are inebriated, you stand a greater chance of surviving a car crash. It’s called the rag doll effect. But this is not to say that you should drink and drive. What it simply means is that person that is not drinking and driving will die when you plough into him in an accident.
I feel I must pin my colours to the mast right up front and say that is very personal to me. My close friend, Andy Carrie, was just 28-years-old and he was involved in an accident where a drunk driver knocked him over. He died on the weekend. Just 28-years-old. It’s heartbreaking. There are so many innocent people who fall prey to this madness, stupidity, recklessness and lawlessness.
The fact is: when you drink and drive, your senses are impaired. For example, there are these year-end parties that take place, in Plettenberg Bay, in Umhlanga and Wentworth and so on. It’s called Rage and what happens is every year thousands of people, mostly teenagers, get together and get completely trashed on alcohol and then get into a car and drive. I know a person whose child was killed in one of these accidents in Wentworth.
It’s this post-matric holiday season euphoria or mania if you will, which seizes the normally on-edge people of this country. And what happens at this time is that these people are either celebrating their joy and happiness or drowning their sorrows and frustrations by drinking themselves into an absolute stupor, and get into their cars thinking they’re absolutely invincible.
The reality is that people’s judgements are impaired – and not only in terms of driving and not being able to see obstacles in the road or their reaction time, but also their judgement of their own sobriety. How many times have you heard someone say, “Oh I’m perfectly fine to drive, I’ve only had six beers!” But that’s not acceptable. You are over the legal limit.
In my opinion, the legal limit really should be zero because everyone is different. For example, I can have half a glass of wine and my judgement will be impaired because I’m not really a drinker. But for someone else the level of impairment will be different. So the only way to be certain that you’re not going to get yourself into an accident or kill some innocent bystander is to not drink and drive.
But the fact of the matter is that there are innumerable campaigns around it and people can scream it till they’re blue in the face, but every year we read of the incidents of deaths and carnage on our roads because of drunk driving. People do it because in South Africa we are generally pretty lawless. It’s to do with the small things like the lady in the suburbs who runs a red light because she doesn’t want to wait at the traffic lights, the taxi driver who stops on the shoulder of the road to pick up and drop off passengers, and the person who takes out his 9mm gun and shoots a brown house snake twice. We live in a society where breaking little laws seems to be the norm.
The law is the law; rules are rules. But everybody wants to bend the rules just a little bit. It’s like jumping the queue in a supermarket, or when the waiter undercharges you for your meal at the restaurant, you don’t say, “Sorry, you didn’t charge me for that second cappuccino!” You say, “I scored!” Obviously I’m speaking in general terms but we tend to push the limits of what’s legal and acceptable in this country. And I imagine we react this way because we feel the police do it, the politicians do it so why shouldn’t we?
There is the psychology of why people break the law, and then there’s the machinery of state that operates in a way that is nonsensical, which adds to everything. So you have a road block on the M4 at 11 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday; what is the point of that? Was there some intelligence reasoning for doing that? Did they know that perhaps people were having their year-end parties and they were going to see how many people they could catch to make their year-end quota? Was it because it was merely more convenient to do it at 11 o’clock so that their bosses don’t have to pay overtime?
There might have been a rational reason for it, but in terms of combating crime, they’re not doing much at that time of the day. On Friday last week, I went to a friend’s place for dinner and because I don’t drink I’m generally the designated driver. So I ended up lifting my friends down to Florida Road and I drove into absolute chaos on that street. People were double parked everywhere, some pouring out of busy restaurants and clubs, visibly drunk and getting into cars and what does the only Metro police on the road do? They overtake the double parkers to get to the front of the queue and drive off. They didn’t stop to say to the drivers of the cars, “You’re parked illegally, move on!”
There are people spilling out of all those clubs and bars on Florida Road and getting into their cars and driving drunk. Where was the roadblock at the bottom of Florida Road on that night? These people should be put through a breathalyser and spend some time behind bars as a very real deterrent to breaking the law. There’s no real deterrent for drinking and driving in this country. I mean, look at the case of that “bridge lawyer” who killed a young woman and her child and the case dragged on and on and he didn’t do any jail time.
There are so many options now; you have Uber, Goodfellas, Buddies, metered taxis and any number of driver services that you can use. Now certain banks are offering a point to point driver as part of their value added services as well. There are all kinds of things that people can connect into to make sure that they get home safely. And I know people are going to say that these services all cost money. But if you are paying for drinks that take you beyond your limit, surely you can afford an Uber or a metered taxi to take you home?
Then you have the establishments that sell alcohol – in terms of their liquor licences, for example, are they being diligent enough to say to the person who comes to the bar and is clearly over the limit, “I hope you’re not driving!” Are establishments being proactive about it? If I were a bar owner I would take away someone’s car keys if I found him or her to be visibly drunk; it’s the responsible thing to do. There should be some kind of internal policy that makes them to stop selling booze to someone who is clearly over the limit. I realise they are for-profit businesses. But it would be good to see some of these businesses balance their social responsibility with their desire to make money.
There’s another thing that really gets to me as well – people who use social media to warn others about roadblocks. I’ve come across a father of teenagers happily posting on Facebook: “There’s a roadblock on the M13 going into Hillcrest. Be careful!” And you think – really? So you’re actually encouraging your children to break the law and how not to get caught, and of course potentially kill an innocent person on the road. I know a popular nightclub in Durban that sends out a WhatsApp message warning motorists of roadblocks because they’ve got the information from friends at the police. They even go as far as advising their group about the alternative routes to take. That’s unacceptable.
Perhaps these clubs and bars should form some kind of relationship with services like Uber and Goodfellas and offer this as a value add to the experience at their establishment. I’m pretty certain that notifying people about roadblocks because you have inside information, is defeating the ends of justice. And that is breaking the law.
I don’t care who you are or what position you believe you hold in society, if you get stopped at a roadblock and made to blow into a breathalyser and are found to be over the legal limit you must spend time in jail. I know people are going to say that our prisons are terrible places and you can’t put people who have merely drunk over their limit next to murderers and rapists. But that’s the risk you take. You know what the system is like. You know that this is South Africa and not the Netherlands where they’ve closed down nineteen prisons over the last ten years because they don’t have enough prisoners. You know this is a country that has violent criminals incarcerated. So you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you’re sharing a bed with some hardened criminal.
Do you have any thoughts on the penalties for drinking and driving? You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @terencepillay1 and connect with him there.
I feel I must pin my colours to the mast right up front and say that is very personal to me. My close friend, Andy Carrie, was just 28-years-old and he was involved in an accident where a drunk driver knocked him over. He died on the weekend. Just 28-years-old. It’s heartbreaking. There are so many innocent people who fall prey to this madness, stupidity, recklessness and lawlessness.
The fact is: when you drink and drive, your senses are impaired. For example, there are these year-end parties that take place, in Plettenberg Bay, in Umhlanga and Wentworth and so on. It’s called Rage and what happens is every year thousands of people, mostly teenagers, get together and get completely trashed on alcohol and then get into a car and drive. I know a person whose child was killed in one of these accidents in Wentworth.
It’s this post-matric holiday season euphoria or mania if you will, which seizes the normally on-edge people of this country. And what happens at this time is that these people are either celebrating their joy and happiness or drowning their sorrows and frustrations by drinking themselves into an absolute stupor, and get into their cars thinking they’re absolutely invincible.
The reality is that people’s judgements are impaired – and not only in terms of driving and not being able to see obstacles in the road or their reaction time, but also their judgement of their own sobriety. How many times have you heard someone say, “Oh I’m perfectly fine to drive, I’ve only had six beers!” But that’s not acceptable. You are over the legal limit.
In my opinion, the legal limit really should be zero because everyone is different. For example, I can have half a glass of wine and my judgement will be impaired because I’m not really a drinker. But for someone else the level of impairment will be different. So the only way to be certain that you’re not going to get yourself into an accident or kill some innocent bystander is to not drink and drive.
But the fact of the matter is that there are innumerable campaigns around it and people can scream it till they’re blue in the face, but every year we read of the incidents of deaths and carnage on our roads because of drunk driving. People do it because in South Africa we are generally pretty lawless. It’s to do with the small things like the lady in the suburbs who runs a red light because she doesn’t want to wait at the traffic lights, the taxi driver who stops on the shoulder of the road to pick up and drop off passengers, and the person who takes out his 9mm gun and shoots a brown house snake twice. We live in a society where breaking little laws seems to be the norm.
The law is the law; rules are rules. But everybody wants to bend the rules just a little bit. It’s like jumping the queue in a supermarket, or when the waiter undercharges you for your meal at the restaurant, you don’t say, “Sorry, you didn’t charge me for that second cappuccino!” You say, “I scored!” Obviously I’m speaking in general terms but we tend to push the limits of what’s legal and acceptable in this country. And I imagine we react this way because we feel the police do it, the politicians do it so why shouldn’t we?
There is the psychology of why people break the law, and then there’s the machinery of state that operates in a way that is nonsensical, which adds to everything. So you have a road block on the M4 at 11 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday; what is the point of that? Was there some intelligence reasoning for doing that? Did they know that perhaps people were having their year-end parties and they were going to see how many people they could catch to make their year-end quota? Was it because it was merely more convenient to do it at 11 o’clock so that their bosses don’t have to pay overtime?
There might have been a rational reason for it, but in terms of combating crime, they’re not doing much at that time of the day. On Friday last week, I went to a friend’s place for dinner and because I don’t drink I’m generally the designated driver. So I ended up lifting my friends down to Florida Road and I drove into absolute chaos on that street. People were double parked everywhere, some pouring out of busy restaurants and clubs, visibly drunk and getting into cars and what does the only Metro police on the road do? They overtake the double parkers to get to the front of the queue and drive off. They didn’t stop to say to the drivers of the cars, “You’re parked illegally, move on!”
There are people spilling out of all those clubs and bars on Florida Road and getting into their cars and driving drunk. Where was the roadblock at the bottom of Florida Road on that night? These people should be put through a breathalyser and spend some time behind bars as a very real deterrent to breaking the law. There’s no real deterrent for drinking and driving in this country. I mean, look at the case of that “bridge lawyer” who killed a young woman and her child and the case dragged on and on and he didn’t do any jail time.
There are so many options now; you have Uber, Goodfellas, Buddies, metered taxis and any number of driver services that you can use. Now certain banks are offering a point to point driver as part of their value added services as well. There are all kinds of things that people can connect into to make sure that they get home safely. And I know people are going to say that these services all cost money. But if you are paying for drinks that take you beyond your limit, surely you can afford an Uber or a metered taxi to take you home?
Then you have the establishments that sell alcohol – in terms of their liquor licences, for example, are they being diligent enough to say to the person who comes to the bar and is clearly over the limit, “I hope you’re not driving!” Are establishments being proactive about it? If I were a bar owner I would take away someone’s car keys if I found him or her to be visibly drunk; it’s the responsible thing to do. There should be some kind of internal policy that makes them to stop selling booze to someone who is clearly over the limit. I realise they are for-profit businesses. But it would be good to see some of these businesses balance their social responsibility with their desire to make money.
There’s another thing that really gets to me as well – people who use social media to warn others about roadblocks. I’ve come across a father of teenagers happily posting on Facebook: “There’s a roadblock on the M13 going into Hillcrest. Be careful!” And you think – really? So you’re actually encouraging your children to break the law and how not to get caught, and of course potentially kill an innocent person on the road. I know a popular nightclub in Durban that sends out a WhatsApp message warning motorists of roadblocks because they’ve got the information from friends at the police. They even go as far as advising their group about the alternative routes to take. That’s unacceptable.
Perhaps these clubs and bars should form some kind of relationship with services like Uber and Goodfellas and offer this as a value add to the experience at their establishment. I’m pretty certain that notifying people about roadblocks because you have inside information, is defeating the ends of justice. And that is breaking the law.
I don’t care who you are or what position you believe you hold in society, if you get stopped at a roadblock and made to blow into a breathalyser and are found to be over the legal limit you must spend time in jail. I know people are going to say that our prisons are terrible places and you can’t put people who have merely drunk over their limit next to murderers and rapists. But that’s the risk you take. You know what the system is like. You know that this is South Africa and not the Netherlands where they’ve closed down nineteen prisons over the last ten years because they don’t have enough prisoners. You know this is a country that has violent criminals incarcerated. So you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you’re sharing a bed with some hardened criminal.
Do you have any thoughts on the penalties for drinking and driving? You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @terencepillay1 and connect with him there.