How common was drink driving? It’s impossible to really know. Anecdotally, plenty seemed to be up to it. But not going crazy. Either in the amount they drank or their driving. On the other hand, I knew plenty of people who either didn’t drink at all when they drove, or only had a couple of pints.
Did the introduction of the breathalyser have an effect on behaviour? I’m not sure these numbers make us any the wiser:
Is the fall in the percentage of positive tests a sign that drink driving was less prevalent? I’m not sure that it is.
| Breath tests administered in England and Wales | |||||
| Year | Initial Breath Tests—Positive | Initial Breath Tests—Negative | Initial Tests Total | ||
| Number | % | Number | % | Number | |
| 1968 | 26,429 | 54.9 | 21,731 | 45.1 | 48,160 |
| 1969 | 31,770 | 57.7 | 23,313 | 42.3 | 55,083 |
| 1970 | 39,393 | 57.1 | 29,585 | 42.9 | 68,978 |
| 1971 | 56,293 | 61.7 | 34,881 | 38.3 | 91,174 |
| 1972 | 69,718 | 61.9 | 42,977 | 38.1 | 112,695 |
| 1973 | 77,334 | 62.6 | 46,267 | 37.4 | 123,601 |
| 1974 | 69,946 | 60.7 | 45,245 | 39.3 | 115,191 |
| 1975 | 70,386 | 57.2 | 52,644 | 42.8 | 123.03 |
| 1976 | 57,186 | 46.7 | 65,235 | 53.3 | 122,421 |
| 1977 | 53,363 | 45 | 65,639 | 55 | 119,002 |
| 1978 | 59,068 | 46.2 | 68,862 | 53.8 | 127,930 |
| 1979 | 69.449 | 46.8 | 78,795 | 53.2 | 148.244 |
| Source: | |||||
| The Brewers' Society UK Statistical Handbook 1980, page 72. | |||||
I would really appreciate anyone's memories of drink driving in the 1970s. Was it common? Was it reduced by the breathalyser?
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17 comments:
I don't know about the seventies, but when I lived in Stoke as a student in the early nineties one of the pubs we regularly drank in was mostly patronised by miners and retired miners who at the end of the night all jumped in their cars and drove home. They weren't necessarily drunk, but would definitely have been over the legal limit. One Christmas the local police force announced that there would be a big crackdown on drink driving over the festive period, with those failing the breathylsyer test being held in the cells overnight even if they were only just over the limit and appeared sober, which the guys in the pub complained bitterly about, seeing it as a major curtailing of their civil liberties.
Matt,
that's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.
I heard a story directly from the person involved of an academic doing some work for the boys in blue. There was a big party to celebrate the end of the investigation they were collaborating on, and everyone got rather drunk. At the end of the night the academic asked about a taxi home and said constabulary said oh don't you worry about that, you can drive yourself home. They sent a couple of squad cars along to shadow him driving his car back home blind drunk.
In Cardiff in the early 70s my next door neighbour who was a rum drinker drove into his driveway with tyres screaming, followed a few minutes later by cop car. The panda car hadn't been able to keep up with his Triumph Vitesse but they knew the car.
Neighbour calmly walked out of front door with a very large glass of rum which he downed in front of them, and the officer with the breath testing kit put it back in the wee Morris! He got a few stern words but not charged with anything.
Back then they had to prove that if you blew over the limit then it had to be 100% due to alcohol drunk prior to driving, so if you could get home ahead of them and kept a bottle of sherry handy for emergencies, you were safe. I'd guess the law has been somewhat overhauled but no doubt is the original reason they would stake out pubs.
In the early 2000's i went to University in West Wales, in the middle of no where. It was a small market town surrounded by farms with the county border right by it, and drink driving was very common. I was once sat drinking in the a pub that was just across the river that was the county boundry and a well known local taxi drive came in and had 2-3 pints with us. After a while his fare came over and he took them off. Im sure he would have been doing the same all evening, he was a big bloke so he could drink a lot without much effect but he was definitely jolly at that stage.
My one brush with a DUI (as they are referred to in the U.S.) came in 1985 in Butte, Montana, which is a hard drinking mining town. It was after a wedding, I was buzzed, and I made the very bad decision to drive to a friend's house to borrow a new album that just came out that he had purchased. He was still at the wedding, but I knew where his house key was stashed.
Second bad decision: I crossed the opposite lane and parked in front of his house facing the wrong way. Here's comes those flashing redlights. I apologized to the policeman for my stupid behavior, and noted that I was home for the evening. (We were college students so our home addresses on our drivers licenses were our parents home address).
The cop could tell I was hammered by the way I was slurring my words, but he didn't administer a breathalyzer test. Instead he made me walk in a straight line, toe to toe. That was a very common sobriety test back then. And I passed! He looked at me and told me he knew that I had been drinking, but he was letting me off since I was home, but as he made his rounds for the rest of the evening, if he saw my car was gone I was going to jail. Needless to say I was done driving for the evening.
Postscript: My buddy came home with his girlfriend all ready to get lucky, only to find me sitting on his couch. He was a bit peeved to have to drive me home.
When I lived in the US fairly recently (2011-2018) people were surprised when I told them drunk driving was socially unacceptable in the UK. In my experience, if someone was drunk in the UK their friends would stop them driving. In the US people would happily have multiple pints of strong IPA and drive home. One guy told me 'It's just a game with the cops'. On the flip side, I heard multiple stories of people being t-boned at 4 way stops or wherever; seemed far more common than in the UK.
I have seen people talk about taproom visits to Treehouse,Heady Topper all rural breweries and I don’t see any discussion of designated drivers knowing that the USA has no public transport and walking beside roads even small back roads can get the attraction of the Law.
The difference between the IPA’s of the USA and the beers of Britain fifty years ago is strength the IPA’s are frequently above 5 percent while said British beers fifty years ago were quite weak 2.5 to 3.90 was a common range.
Oscar
The Healy Raes here in Ireland tried to get a two pint exemption for rural areas become law.
Oscar
Anon, I don't think that's typical of US attitudes toward drunk driving. The BAC threshold is somewhat higher here, possible inclining toward some degree of rationalization when it comes to estimating how intoxicated one is. But there's a social norm against drinking and driving, same as elsewhere.
Back in the late 70s early 80s, in rural Lincolnshire, one of the larger village's still had a local Bobby, who would drink in the local boozers. Occasionally, before he left, he would annouce loudly things like "I'd better not drive, the town police are out doing checks", or "I had better drive slowly down xxx road, my colleagues have a speed trap set up there".
I'm an American who lived several years in England (Midlands) and in the early 2000s driving drunk was absolutely more acceptable in the UK than in the US. The "game with the cops" comment above strikes me as what some very trashy men would say in a dive bar, but attitudes among the average American were much more negative. The MADD campaign of the 80s was extremely effective.
The guy with the 'game with the cops' comment was a mid-30's software engineer who drove a Porsche, didn't strike me as trashy. I worked for a company of 150 people and those who went for a drink after work would happily drink 5 or 6 pints of strong IPA. The norm was to drink a pint of water if you were feeling a bit light headed. Plus a visit to the taco truck outside around pint number 4. All these guys (invariably) were well educated people with good jobs and mostly with families. Everyone was highly surprised that drink driving was socially unacceptable in the UK. This was in WA, maybe other areas of the country are different. I never, ever encountered anyone using a designated driver or car pooling on a night out.
Caveat - just spoke to my American wife and she asked me to make the point that 'drunk driving' in the UK means above the limit more or less these days. So more than 2 pints of 4% bitter, probably less. Eyes would be raised if you said you were driving after 3 pints (feel free to disagree - I no longer live in the UK). So by that definition, two pints of 7% IPA would be 'drunk driving' - way above the limit. I'm not talking about driving when absolutely shit-faced...more lack of social intolerance in the UK for driving over the legal limit. I didn't see that in the US, much more of people deciding if they were ok to drive, and nobody interfering in that decision, when they were clearly intoxicated beyond what would be considered legal to drive in Europe. Hope that clarifies.
There were Guards here in Ireland who partook in lock ins until the 1970’s.
Oscar
To (perhaps needlessly) add to the comments above, having lived for over a decade in Texas, I can say driving over the limit is endemic here. The comments above about the Porsche driver chimes with my experience. When I first got here I was somewhat appalled at how normal it is for people to go for drinks after work, down two or three very strong drinks (often generous cocktails or 7 or 8% ABV craft beers), eat some part of a basket of fries and then call it good before piling into their oversized SUV or pickup and hurtling home on the freeway. And those are the sensible ones. If I plan on drinking, I make a point of getting there with a designated driver, or I walk or get the bus. I get some odd looks from friends sometimes when they realise I just walked 45 minutes to the bar so that I can avoid driving after drinking. It's just not in the American mindset. Driving over the limit is completely normalised, there is zero social stigma as far as I can tell.
Thanks Iain that was exactly my experience in WA too. Driving over the limit (as distinct from driving when obviously blind drunk) was completely acceptable among the people I worked with in the US, whereas my experience was that in the UK it is not considered acceptable (anymore).
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