at least not when they drink and drive and kill a bunch of people

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1915467,00.html

sorry everyone who read that last article about how cool it was that you could drink and be a parent, LOOKS LIKE YOU WERE WRONG, because some woman killed herself and her kids by DRINKING

hey, did you guys hear the one about how you can get hammered, and go 98 MPH in a 45 MPH zone, and get caught pissing outside your car, but it’s ok as long as you’re a cop?

yeah that’s a good one.

it’s a good thing they didn’t go the wrong way on the expressway, killing a mother and seriously injuring her daughter, or maybe the sherrif would have had some stern words for them.

so a couple months ago i got a speeding ticket. i elected to take the driver improvement test online to cut down my fine and also keep the points off my record.

the test has a huge section about DUI and how bad it is, which is completely irrelevant since i wasn’t drunk. but i guess they have to drill this shit into you regardless, just to be sure you’re aware.

the test was full of the usual “one drink makes you a drunk driver” rhetoric which is bullshit, but to be expected from an official government-sanctioned driving test.

there are plenty of other tidbits in this lesson book that go beyond “don’t drink and drive” though, and go right into “don’t drink”. take for instance the following paragraph, which alternates between demonizing drunk driving and demonizing drinking in general:

IS DRINKING FUN?

Where does one get the idea we must drink to have fun? Maybe somebody told them they were having fun and since they can’t remember what they did, they believe that they had fun. I believe that television plays a big part in making us think we must drink to have fun. Think about the last beer commercial that had real people (not frogs, or dogs or something else) in it. Now what were the people doing? You’re right, they were having fun, playing ball, bowling in the snow, etc. By the way, have you ever seen any commercials without beautiful people in them? I never have. Who are these commercials trying to reach? Is it our youth? Now, have you ever seen a commercial like this? A good looking man comes on and looks you in the eye and says, “be a modern-day man and drink A B C beer,” then he pauses for a second and finishes the sentence by saying, “Take your car out and kill a friend.” I suggest you will not hear the last statement, but you only have to read the newspaper to find that statement almost everyday. Do we have reasons to drink, or are they just excuses? Can you agree with me that the DECISION to drive after drinking is not a good one? Remember that EVERY CHOICE HAS A CONSEQUENCE. Good choices bring good consequences; bad choices bring bad consequences. Bad choices in 2004 killed 1,093 people in Florida. As we continue to drink, other parts of the body will slow down and eventually stop if enough alcohol is consumed. You can literally drink yourself to death in one sitting!

i can literally drink myself to death in one sitting, so…… don’t drink and drive? i guess?

anyway, this test did such a good job at conflating these two issues that it’s hard to hide the prohibitionist tendencies behind it.

i also like the logic in this section:

Presumption of impairment is .08 BAC. The reason for such a presumption is because everybody reacts to alcohol differently. Some individuals can be the same sex, height, weight, have the same amount of alcohol and one individual can be visibly far more impaired than the other, while the other could recite the Gettysburg address. This may seem unfair but it is the law. A line has been drawn to which everybody must adhere.

so… “everybody reacts to alcohol differently”, therefore, everyone should be subject to the same arbitrary BAC number. frankly, if someone can recite the gettysburg address, they can drive. BAC be damned.

it’s unfair but it’s the law! at least the state admits that the law is unfair, that’s pretty refreshing.

Contrary to what you may think, I don’t believe driving drunk is a good idea. When you’re drunk, you become a bad driver. You are more likely to crash. Yes, that’s true.

However, I do believe that:

1. the amount of “drunk” the law allows you is arbitrary and meaningless
2. the specter of drunk drivers killing innocent people is used to promote an overall agenda of prohibition and an erosion of civil liberties, which is unacceptable
3. to further this goal, the real danger has been overstated by use of distorted statistics and emotional appeals to focus on the relatively rare, tragic worst-case scenarios.

For instance, studies have shown that driving while talking on a cell phone is more dangerous than driving drunk, but where’s the social outrage?

Sure, everyone complains about drivers on the phone, but I see so many of them when I drive home from work, it’s laughable. Why aren’t these people called “monsters” and summarily stripped of their licenses? Where’s the phalanx of angry friends and relatives of people killed by drivers who were on the phone at the time? When something legal is tolerated even when it’s “worse” than something which is illegal, it generally sends the message that the illegal activity isn’t really all that bad after all and we’re being misled by the powers that be.

That feeling is reinforced by stories like this one, about a cop who also didn’t think drinking and driving was as big a deal as everyone made it out to be. He got drunk with some police buddies, drove himself into a pickup truck, and died.

Sheriff Nugent said Stegner was a good cop who “paid a steep price for making a bad choice.”
…
“Hopefully out of something that is very negative … we can use it as a positive teaching tool,” the sheriff said.

He was obviously very well respected by his peers. Would the praise have been so forthcoming if he had killed someone else? Or would the state government have rallied to ban drinking, like they do when college kids kill themselves?

We’re innundated with commercials warning us that “ONE DRINK IS TOO MANY” and “YOU DRINK, YOU DRIVE, YOU DIE”, and yet a group of cops all go out drinking and then drive home.

Why is that?

Take this one, for instance: a smirnoff ice commercial where a guy who’s had a couple drinks gets his car destroyed by his friend’s remote control monster truck.

Leaving aside the fact that while the tipsy driver may have potentially caused some damage on his way home, that monster truck totalling the drunkard’s car and then careening into a residential neighborhood most certainly did… if you tried to stop a drunk cop from driving after he’s been drinking (especially when he’s surrounded by a bunch of other drunk cops who see no problem with this at all), I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re the one who is going to get destroyed.

Maybe they know something we don’t know.

There’s another follow-up regarding the Florida Sheriff’s Deputy who was fired after repeatedly arresting sober people for DUI.

This time the story revolves around one of the people the fired deputy had arrested, herself a fellow deputy, driving home after having a few drinks with dinner. According to the arrest report, she had failed the field sobriety test, although an examination of the police video showed otherwise.

I think the most telling part of the entire article is this:

Blair said she declined to take the Breathalyzer exam that night because she thinks they are sometimes not calibrated correctly.

So apparently even Sheriff’s Deupties think breathalyzers have a tendency to be inaccurate; an allegation that has spurred at least one lawsuit to allow defendants to analyze the source code that they operate on, and caused hundreds of cases to be thrown out when such requests were refused.

The Sheriff was disappointed and had this to say:

Sheriff David Gee said the machines are regularly calibrated by the state.

“In that case, I’d have to say I was disappointed that one of our deputies wouldn’t take the test,” he said Wednesday. “If you’re not impaired, then why wouldn’t you take it?”

Well Sheriff, it seems obvious to me. Since there are obviously unscrupulous officers out there who arrest sober people for DUI, maybe your own deputies have the right idea in not contributing to their own railroading.

I think I’ll agree with the lawyers who say always refuse to take the breath test, regardless of whether you’re actually drunk or not.

I know there’s controversy over whether having a 0.08 BAC really means you can’t properly drive a car. I’m of the opinion that actual impairment shouldn’t be tied to a one-size-fits-all number. However, there are some people who think so much as a sip of beer instantly makes you into a sloppy drunken muderer, just waiting to get behind the wheel and send their precious innocent children to an early grave.

This over-zealous officer was obviously one of the latter. He doesn’t believe impairment should be tied to a number either:

“I don’t prescribe to the theory that somehow you have to be 0.08 to be drunk or impaired,” Brock, 38, told investigators.

That’s nice and all, but apparently he also doesn’t care if you’re actually impaired.

Repeatedly, investigators found Brock reported failures in field sobriety tests when his patrol car videocamera documented the opposite. He wrote, for instance, that a driver on Oct. 25, 2005, lost balance while turning. The video of the encounter showed that wasn’t the case. The driver blew a 0.01 in the breath test but was arrested anyway.

He said drivers incorrectly recited the alphabet, used arms for balance and slurred speech — when the video showed correct alphabets, perfect balance and clear speech.

At the end of the article is this gem:

Said Brock: “I mean, perfect world, we need more deputies and fewer people.”

Luckily for those of us who perfer not to live in a police state, he was fired from his job by the Sheriff’s department.

Frankly I think the punishment for cops who abuse the rights of the public this way should be much harsher, but what do I know? I’m just a drunkard.

ADDENDUM: I was reading another article about this guy which had some more details, including this tidbit:

A handful of times over the years, he was reprimanded or suspended for damaging patrol cars in what were deemed avoidable accidents.

This cop, who is supposedly trying to stop drunk drivers because drunk drivers cause accidents, has been out there causing accidents. Now that they’ve fired him, maybe they should take his license away while they’re at it, just like they did to the sober people he arrested.