It's cheaper, legal and kills more people than opioids. But public officials are much more united in the fight against drugs than alcohol.
Most Americans have a general sense that drunken driving isn’t as bad a problem as it was a generation ago. But few realize how much those numbers changed in a relatively short time. When the federal government started counting alcohol-impaired traffic deaths in 1982, there were more than 21,000 a year. By 2011, the death toll was down by 53 percent. States had raised the legal drinking age to 21 and adopted a common rule that a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 meant “too drunk to drive.” Many states also mandated the installation of interlock devices to prevent those with a history of drunken driving from turning on their ignition unless they were sober. Those laws, coupled with education and prevention campaigns, helped reduce drunk driving deaths to fewer than 10,000 in 2011.
But recently the trend has stalled. The total number of alcohol-impaired traffic fatalities actually rose in both 2015 and 2016. “Drunk driving has been around since the automobile was invented and it’s still the biggest killer on the highway,” says J.T. Griffin, the chief government affairs officer for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Indeed, alcohol causes more traffic deaths per year than either speeding or driving without a seatbelt.
10,497: The number of fatal alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2016, the highest since 2009
The national conversation around addiction has been dominated in recent years by opioids. Certainly, the rapid rise in opioid overdoses, which claimed 42,000 lives in 2016 alone, is a pressing issue for states across the country. The White House has declared a national public health emergency over the epidemic, and governments everywhere are marshalling efforts to combat the crisis.
But the fact is that alcohol kills roughly 88,000 Americans each year, more than double the number of opioid deaths. Almost half of alcohol fatalities come from chronic health problems attributed to excessive alcohol consumption, such as liver cirrhosis, breast cancer and heart disease. Those alcohol-induced deaths are on the rise. Excluding certain acute causes, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths increased by about 47 percent between 1999 and 2015.