Legalize Drunk Driving

Mumbai has become a terrible place. I always had great pride in the Mumbai system. If you want to be left alone – Mumbai leaves you alone. One of the reasons I fled Calcutta was the interference of the Calcutta Police if you were caught driving after 11 PM. The Cal Police invariably would put up barricades, stop the car and put those glaring torches on your face to enquire your destination and your starting point of the journey. I was really fed up.

I came to Mumbai about a decade back and found the environment more free. You could drive anytime of the night, reach a dance bar fully drunk at 4 or 5 AM, have more drinks and come back peacefully to your home.

Now that has changed. The dance bars are long gone. And last year the AUTHORITIES declared that a blood-alcohol level of X % and above is criminal and must be severely punished.

I have an elementary point. What precisely is being criminalized? Not bad driving. Not destruction of property. Not the taking of human life or reckless endangerment. The crime is having the wrong substance in your blood. Yet it is possible, in fact, to have this substance in your blood, even while driving, and not commit anything like what has been traditionally called a crime.


What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law illogical, whimsical, and dependent on the judgment of cops and cop’s expert. Indeed, without the government's "Breathanalyzer," there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law. [Did the manufacturers of breathanalyzer had a part in this bizzare decision?]. Hell.

Sure, we can do informal calculations in our head, based on our weight and the amount of alcohol we have had over some period of time. But at best these will be estimates. We have to wait for the government to administer a test to tell us whether or not we are criminals. That's not the way law is supposed to work. Indeed, this is a form of tyranny.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.
It’s like doing a racial profiling. If there are too many bhaiyas in a particular region, then there is a high rate of crime there. Government should be preventing and punishing crimes, not indulging in probabilities and predictions. So should we have a driver’s profile and assume that just because a person had a few pegs, he is automatically a danger.

In fact, driver profiling is worse than racial profiling, because the latter only implies that the police are more watchful, not that they criminalize race itself. Despite the propaganda, what's being criminalized in the case of drunk driving is NOT the probability that a person driving will get into an accident but the FACT of the blood-alcohol content itself. A drunk driver is humiliated and destroyed even when he hasn't done any harm.

Of course, enforcement is a serious problem. A sizeable number of people leaving a bar or a restaurant would probably qualify as Driving Under Influence. But there is no way for the police to know unless they are tipped off by a swerving car or reckless driving in general. But the question becomes: why not ticket the swerving or recklessness and leave the alcohol out of it? WHY INDEED?.

To emphasize the fact that it is some level of drinking that is being criminalized, government sets up these outrageous, civil-liberties-violating barricades that stop people to check their blood – even when they have done nothing at all. This is a gross attack on liberty that implies that the government has and should have total control over us, extending even to the testing of intimate biological facts. But somehow we put up with it because we have conceded the first assumption that government ought to punish us for the content of our blood and not just our actions.

There are many factors that cause a person to drive poorly. You may have sore muscles after a weight-lifting session and have slow reactions. You could be sleepy. You could be in a bad mood, or angry after a fight with your spouse. You could be under a lot of stress or duress. Should the government be allowed to administer mood test, anger tests, tiredness tests, stress/duress test or soreness tests? That is the very next step, and don't be surprised when THE AUTHORITY starts to examine this question.

Already, there's a law which prohibits cell phone use while driving. Such an absurdity follows from the idea that government should make judgments about what we are allegedly likely to do.
What's more, some people drive MORE safely after a few drinks, precisely because they know their reaction time has been slowed and they must pay more attention to safety. We all know drunks who have an amazing ability to drive perfectly after being liquored up. They should be liberated from the force of the law, and only punished if they actually do something wrong.

We need to put a stop to this whole absurd and bizarre trend now. Drunk driving should be legalized. And please don't write to me to say: "I am offended by your insensitivity because my mother was killed by a drunk driver." Any person responsible for killing someone else is guilty of manslaughter or murder and should be punished accordingly.

But it is perverse to punish a murderer not because of his crime but because of some biological consideration, e.g. he has red hair.
Bank robbers may tend to wear masks, but the crime they commit has nothing to do with the mask. In the same way, drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, - and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all. The law should focus on violations of person and property, not scientific oddities like blood content.