For many years, lawmakers have been aware that drinking and driving may lead to disastrous consequences. In 2013, the proportion of deaths involving motor vehicles that included drivers with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) at or over the legal limit of 0.08 was roughly 31%. A blood alcohol content of 0.08 corresponds to about two or three drinks for most persons in an hour. It might take just two or three drinks to significantly impair hearing, vision, concentration, and response speed.
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The ideal way to deploy monies to lessen the issue of drunk driving has not been evident. Legislators have access to a wide range of interventions, such as alcohol ignition interlocks in individual automobiles and sobriety checkpoints where law enforcement personnel randomly inspect drivers for drunkenness. But how can decision-makers determine which existing regulations will save the most drunk driving-related lives for their implementation funds, given their constrained resources?
In general, which interventions for drunk driving work best?
Policymakers have a plethora of interventions at their disposal. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll concentrate on five drunk driving-related initiatives that have shown promise; the majority have been implemented in less than half of the states in the union. Note: Six DWI interventions are taken into account by MV PICCS in its analysis. One of the interventions—saturation patrols—was difficult to determine where it was previously implemented, therefore we left it out of our brief study.) The quintet are:
An apparatus known as an alcohol ignition interlock keeps a car from starting until the driver blows into a tube to demonstrate sobriety.
A sobriety checkpoint is a location where a group of police officers pull over vehicles to determine whether the drivers are drunk.
Impoundment of license plates: a driver found guilty of driving while intoxicated must surrender their car’s license plate.
Limitations on plea deals and DWI diversion: laws that prohibit DWI arrestees from withdrawing from prosecution or entering a plea of not guilty.
Impoundment of a car refers to the temporary seizure of a DWI offender’s vehicle, which they must then either return or relinquish.
Cost-Effectiveness Ratio: What Is the Price of Saving a Live?
Cost-effectiveness is used by MV PICCS to compare therapies. The tool includes two pieces of information for each intervention: the impact of putting the intervention into practice and the cost to the state of doing so. The impact is the estimated cost of lives saved and injuries prevented as a result of the intervention, stated in monetary terms. The expenses are the implementation-related expenditures borne by the state. These expenses include items like the time spent by police, DMV employees, and expensive equipment. The cost-effectiveness ratio is the ratio of impact to cost: The intervention is more cost-effective the greater the ratio. In this instance, the monetized worth of the lives saved and injuries avoided in comparison to the state’s cost of the intervention is known as the cost-effectiveness ratio.
It is effective but expensive to implement all state drunk driving laws.
Every year, 1,182 lives would be saved in the US if all five DWI therapies were put into practice in places where they are not currently available. The monetized value would be $2.7 billion, while the yearly cost would be around $764 million. This strategy has a 3.53 cost-effectiveness ratio, which means that for every $1 the state spends on implementing the interventions, society benefits by $3.53 overall. Even if this cost-effectiveness ratio is favorable, there may be more cost-effective strategies to prevent drunk driving. We must search for certain therapies with greater cost-effectiveness ratios in order to ascertain this.
The Need for State-Specific Analysis
Depending on the state, an intervention may have a varied cost-effectiveness ratio. This is because the prices and consequences vary throughout states. The distribution of collision causes (the percentage of DWI-related crash deaths varies by state) and the importance of preventing harm or saving a life determine how an intervention will perform. The expenses are determined by the cost of implementing an intervention, which differs from state to state due to factors including population, size, and pay provided to state personnel. The estimated number of offenders in each state determines the cost of implementing an intervention for drunk driving, hence the price varies accordingly.
In order to determine which initiatives are the most cost-effective, we must first rank each intervention according to its cost-effectiveness in each state. The interventions that are already in use should not be incorporated into the analysis. 51 states times five interventions is 255 potential intervention-state combinations; if we take out the ones that are currently in use, the number drops to 119.