Meh... We live in the US. We have some of the worst drivers in advanced countries. I dunno how many of 'em are drunk, but that'd at least explain some of the driving I've seen.
I used to drive drunk when I was younger. I never got caught and never bumped into anything. However, I gave that up a long time ago. It was considered normal back then. The penalty wasn't even stiff. It was like a weekend in jail, if that. I don't even think they took your license for the first offense.
Which is how we ended up with MADD...
I do enjoy a glass of wine or three, but tend to not really get all that inebriated.
Back many years ago I was in school at Great Lakes NTC. While there I met a very beautiful young lady. We became very close, and when she graduated from nursing school and went home to Newport Rhode Island, we kept in touch. She worked as an emergency room nurse, at a local hospital. When I graduated, I was stationed on a ship in Newport. We got back together, and I considered asking her to marry me. I departed on a 6 month cruise to the med in 1973, and during that time we both wrote every couple days. I decided, after 3 months of the cruise, to ask her. About 5 months into the cruise, her letters suddenly stopped. I wrote to her parents, whom I new quite well, and got no reply either. As you can imagine, I was quite upset, but helpless to find out what was wrong, from thousands of miles away. When we got back, I went to her apartment to talk about it, and a strange woman answered the door. She had been living there 2 months and had no idea where my friend was. I went to her parents house, and they told me that she was walking home from work one evening, and a drunk driver went up onto the sidewalk and ran over her, and back onto the road and just kept on driving. They dId not know how to tell me in a letter. She was dead on arrival at the hospital where she worked, which was only 3 blocks away!!!!!!!!!!! There was a witness who got the license of the car. The driver, a RICH 65 year old alcoholic, lost his license for a year. No fine, no jail time, and he went back to court 2 weeks later and got his license back, after killing someone on his fifth dui!!!! It took a long time to deal with that, and I still have no love for drunk drivers. I can only imagine how her friends at the emergency room felt when they saw her come in. I still have her picture, and explained to my wife what happened.
So, yeah, the dui laws are much better now, although you still hear of mutiple offenders crying about prison time after their 5th offense.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that we got extended on that cruise due to the Yom Kippor war, so it was a 7 month cruise by the time we finally got back.
I also had a front row seat, as an EMT, to the carnage that drunk drivers cause every day. They seem to be the only ones that don't get hurt, well, at least most of the time. I could tell you some stories that would frizz your hair and turn it gray.




