National Geographic
Almost exactly 38 years ago, Linda Thompson spoke to her three-year-old son Trevor for the last time. He and his sister Katie were visiting family two hours south of their home in Spokane, Washington, and they talked excitedly about joining a town parade.
Early the next morning before the parade, Trevor was killed instantly when a drunk driver plowed into the pony cart he was riding in with his grandfather. Katie’s horse bucked her as the crash occurred, saving her life; Thompson’s father survived with major head trauma.
Looking to channel her grief and rage, Thompson began working with the Greater Spokane Substance Abuse Council, where she is now executive director. Her decades of activism there have already helped push through one major change in American alcohol policy, lowering the federal blood alcohol content (BAC) limit for a driver from .1 to .08 g/100 ml of blood in the early 2000s.
For reference, one standard drink consumed quickly on an empty stomach amounts to around .02 to .03 BAC. In response, alcohol-related driving fatalities dropped 27 percent between 2005 and 2011.
But soon after, that number began to creep up again. By 2021, “we were basically back where we were in 2005,” says David Jernigan, professor of health law policy at Boston University. The most recent data, from 2022, shows 13,524 people died in accidents related to alcohol-impaired driving nationwide that year, representing a third of traffic fatalities; 282 of them were children under the age of 14.
With this data in mind, a coalition of scientists and activists like Thompson argue that .08 is still too high and the U.S. should join the roughly 100 other countries in the world that maintain limits of .05 or lower.
Laboratory testing and highway safety data have long shown that by .05, every driver is impaired. Now, data from Utah, the one state that has lowered its limit to .05, shows that the change can save lives when implemented domestically. Will the standard it sets be enough to create the domino effect activists like Thompson have been waiting for?
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How alcohol affects driving
Since alcohol is distributed first to areas of high water content, such as the brain and spinal cord, “the first effect of alcohol in the human body is on judgment,” explains Houston forensic toxicology consultant Matthew Andrade Cheney.
Experimental data shows that a BAC as low as .02 can affect steering and ability to stay in a lane. By .03, drivers may struggle to multitask, balancing navigation with conversation or changing the radio station.. At around .05, it takes longer to notice hazards and it’s harder to maintain consistent speed. “Virtually everyone is impaired to some extent with driving performance at .05 BAC,” says Jim Fell, principal research scientist with the National Opinion Research Center.
Risks increase along with impairment. By .05 BAC drivers are twice as likely, and by .08 nearly four times as likely, to die in a car crash as a sober driver, according to Washington Traffic Safety Commission director of external relations Mark McKechnie. Other studies show even more dramatic results; one found the fatality rate for drivers with .08 BAC was up to 17 times higher than sober drivers. This may be because, as BAC increases, “risk taking goes way up,” McKechnie says, with alcohol-impaired drivers less likely to wear a seat belt and more likely to speed.
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The U.S.’s BAC limits are higher than most of the world
As the U.S. has adjusted to its .08 limit, data from abroad has shown the power of moving to .05.
Following the introduction of a .05 percent law in Canberra, Australia, one study found 90 percent fewer drivers on the road with BAC levels between .05 and .08, and a decrease of about 25 percent in drivers with even higher BAC levels. In Canada, similar laws reduced the percentage of fatally injured drivers with .05 BAC or higher by 3.7 percent. And a study looking at data from multiple countries, co-authored by Fell, found an 11 percent reduction in fatal crashes and a 5 percent reduction in non-fatal crashes in locales where laws shifted.
“It’s been tested a lot,” McKechnie says. Across countries of varying sizes, types of transit, and levels of alcohol consumption, “when they have a .05 standard they tend to have significantly fewer fatalities.”
When Utah made its change in 2018, its fatal crash rate declined almost 20 percent in the first year, four times the reduction the U.S. saw nationwide. Fatalities involving drivers with BAC above .15 also decreased, bucking a national trend upward. And crashes aside, almost a quarter of Utah drivers who drank alcohol reported changing their drinking-and-driving behavior after the law went into effect, most frequently by planning a safe ride home beforehand.
Data from Utah and around the world show that these laws act as a general deterrent to drinking and driving both below and above the current limit, Fell says. These policies both influence people who are willing to adjust their ideas of what is high risk and people more motivated by the threat of arrest. That means they require ongoing enforcement and awareness efforts to be effective, Jernigan points out. “You take your eye off the ball here and it’s going to creep back up.”
Will more states move to .05?
With Thompson on the front lines, Washington is now one of eight states currently considering a move to .05, along with California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont, momentum that activists hope could create a domino effect of policy change. But despite promising trends from Utah and other countries, changing state policy is still an uphill battle.
“Legislators don’t really put much faith in studies done in other countries,” Fell says. But now that a state has made the change, policy makers are also discounting Utah’s trends, arguing the state’s Mormon-heavy population makes it too much of an outlier to follow.
Meanwhile as each state considers this new conversation, the hospitality and alcohol industries turn out to resist potential movement, worried a .05 limit will make people consume less if they go out at all, Fell says. Bills were recently quashed this way in Washington and Hawaii.
In response, McKechnie cites countries like Ireland, Scotland, and France as examples of places with strong alcohol-making traditions and drinking cultures—and .05 limits. “Those industries tend to do just fine, and they have lower traffic fatalities,” he says. Data from Utah supports that trend, with upward trends in alcohol consumption and sales from before the new law’s passage continuing unchanged.
Still, no conversation about alcohol and automobiles can be resolved without discussing infrastructure and public transit, Cheney points out. In some places, ridesharing apps provide a ready solution for drinkers avoiding driving, for example, but in his home of Houston, “the area is so large, it really becomes cost prohibitive.”
Especially in transit-poor places like Houston or Spokane, laws create norms, and norms shape behavior, Thompson says. After their policy change, data shows that Utahns drank and went out the way they always did—but they prepared to drive home differently. “That’s the real key to this,” she says: building “a norm where you don’t ever get in the car impaired.”
