Interlock Facts

This month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that traffic fatalities are at their lowest levels since 1961. Drunken-driving fatalities dropped by almost 10 percent nationwide and by 13 percent in Tennessee.

Though truly "drunken" driving is a serious issue, the problem has been greatly reduced since the 1970s and 1980s. Few people outside the traffic-safety field know about the tremendous progress. And the anti-alcohol activists are not about to admit it.

Traffic-safety advocates, often led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, relentlessly remind the American public that the abuse of alcohol continues to be a huge problem on our roadways and, as a result, the most drastic measures (and financial contributions to MADD) are needed.

Consider traffic-fatality reports. In 2007, federal statisticians classified almost 18,000 deaths as alcohol-related. However, alcohol-related does not mean alcohol-caused. In fact, that figure includes anyone killed in a crash in which at least one person (driver, pedestrian, cyclist, etc.) was estimated to have had any trace of alcohol. If a non-drinking driver speeds through a stop sign, crashing into and killing a family whose driver had one glass of wine at dinner, statistics reflect all their deaths as "alcohol-related."

After accounting for those people, actual victims only make up 10 percent of the widely reported statistic — a considerably smaller amount than activists have led us to believe.

In the 1990s, these anti-alcohol activists assured lawmakers and the public that tightening the legal arrest limit (from 0.10 to 0.08 percent blood-alcohol content) would save 600-800 lives each year. More than a decade later, research proves it didn't work. And for a predictable reason: Changing the law only changed the definition and lowered the threshold for qualifying as a "drunken" driver.

Ignored was the fact that the majority of real "drunks" are driving at more than double the 0.08 limit. But activist efforts drove our focus lower. One study published in Contemporary Economic Policy concluded that efforts spent to reduce allowable BACs to 0.08 would have been better spent encouraging effective measures against the relatively few repeat offenders. MADD and other anti-alcohol groups aren't heeding that warning. Instead, they're demanding more funding, more legislation and more manpower for other misguided traffic safety measures such as sobriety roadblocks — a tactic that rarely catches drunken drivers, but does manage to trample our civil liberties.

MADD has also asked Congress for $30 million to fund the development of in-car alcohol sensors to prevent you from starting your car after a glass of wine. They want it installed in all new cars as a manufacturing requirement (if they get their way, count on these devices occasionally malfunctioning and disabling your car when no one has been drinking).

Perhaps the most serious consequence of these twisted statistics is that safety officials focus disproportionately on drinking and driving at the expense of more dangerous behaviors on our roadways. Speeding is the No. 1 cause of fatalities on the highway and distracted driving — with the increased use of cell phones, text-messaging, GPS, etc. — continues to rise exponentially.

It's tempting to dismiss my position because I represent the hospitality industry and instead take the word of groups with heroic-sounding names and seemingly good intentions. But MADD is a $50 million-a-year business, working hard to keep donations coming in the door. They routinely receive low marks from charity rating groups. Its own founder has previously denounced some MADD executives as "neo-prohibitionist."

When crafting traffic-safety policy, officials should not rely on the doctored statistics of activist groups with a vested interest in keeping the drunken-driving problem bigger than it is. They should examine the raw data for themselves. If they do, they'll see that to make us all safer on the roadways, they must focus on all facets of traffic safety, not myopically on a single problem that today is a fraction of the original problem.

Sarah Longwell is the managing director of the American Beverage Institute in Washington, an association of restaurants committed to the responsible serving of adult beverages.