No one can drink and drive safely. Alcohol is a depressant. It affects all the cells of the body, especially the brain central nervous system. As a result, alcohol dulls your memory concentration, insight, perception and judgements. The move alcohol in your blood, the more your driving errors increase. You will react more slowly. You will erratically speed up and slow down. Your ability to brake and steer is impaired. Your response to any unusual emergency situation is impaired. In general, your driving becomes careless and potentially deadly.

Alcohol affects everyone around it. National survey has shown that every one in five drivers have been drinking. And every one in twenty is impaired in some way by alcohol. Alcohol/motor vehicle crashes are number one causes of death in America. Every year, thirty-two percent of the deaths are in some way related to motor vehicle crashes. Upward of fifty percent of driver fatalities involve alcohol and at least thirty-eight percent of these drivers are impaired. Every twenty minutes a person is killed in an alcohol related tragedy. A total of 2, 364 youths, aged 15-20 died in alcohol-related crashes in 1993. This drunk-driving problem is affecting not only locally, but also nationally, since impaired driving is the largest single criminal cause of death and injury on Canadian highways.

Also, at the beginning of 1997, there were 500 drunken drivers facing felony charges under a new 1995 Montana law. In Lake county alone, almost one third of felony prosecutions are now for fourth offense drunken driving violations. One of the main reason of why there are so many drinkers out there is because the bars and clubs keep serving customers alcohol. People get drunk from it and drive around. They don t care about their safeties. Drunk driving is a very big social problem. Not only in Richmond area, it effects the whole world.