Durnk Driving

Driving under the influence of alcohol have affected and devastated countless of people's lives. Driving under the influence is one of the most dangerous situations you can put yourself or someone else into. The evidence against driving while intoxicated is massive and it has left a long trail of broken dreams and lives. If you drink and drive, not only do you possibly put yourself at risk, but your passengers and pedestrians, and other people on the roads. According to the most recent statistics by the National Commission Against Drunk Driving is that 17, 000 Americans die each year in alcohol-related traffic crashes and 600,000 Americans are injured. (National Commission Against Drunk Driving, 2003). That's an average of one fatality every thirty minutes. Just think about that. Every thirty minutes someone's life is cut short and families are devastated. These victims could easily be your friends, relatives, or neighbors. The majority of the injuries related to the alcohol-related crashes are not just cuts and bruises, people got paralyzed, severely disfigured, or lost the ability to live a normal life, work, or play with their children and now rely heavily on the aid of others.

The reasons why alcohol and driving do not mix are plenty. The body is a very complicated organism is everything in it has to go just right for it to function properly. Alcohol only affects how your body functions negatively. Alcohol is a downer that reduces activity in the central nervous system. The person exhibits loss muscle tone, loss of fine motor coordination, and often have "drunken" gait. (Camping Survival, 2003). Depression and alcohol also do not mix. When people get depressed from everyday life they have the tendency to do succumb to the easy but temporary solution of alcohol. When people are depress and drink, a beer is live a potato chip, you cannot have just one. "After drinking people usually feel pleasure and become talkative at first. These feelings are usually replaced by drowsiness as the alcohol is eliminated from the body, and the drinker may then become withdrawn. This pattern often encourages people to drink more to keep the buzz going." ( Kuhn, Swartzwelder, Wilson) When people get like that they usually get a little bolder and want to do normal tasks and routines like driving a motorized vehicle. The effects of alcohol result in poor coordination, slurred speech, double vision, decrease of self-control, lost of consciousness and maybe even death.

The legal consequences of drunk driving are also severe. The more a person drinks, the more their ability to make important decisions erode and becomes impaired. After even just one drink a person can lose the ability to operate a vehicle. At certain parts in the state of intoxication, it becomes illegal to drive a car and if you get caught it can possible lead to fines, or even imprisonment. The legal limit of alcohol you can consume changes from state to state, but the penalty of driving under the influence is always severe. Getting arrested and maybe being forced to sleep in a drunk tank is just some of the problems you also have to carry the humiliation and the shame of being caught and that person might just end up with their name written up in the local news paper. Alcoholism is a disease and it can make you do some things you would not want to and to repeat your past mistakes. More than one-third of drives arrested for intoxication are repeat offenders. Drivers with a prior DUI offense have a much higher likelihood to be in a fatal crash. (National Commission Against Drunk Driving, 2003). Repeat offenders also face the risk of ruining their own lives. They have the risk

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