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Less Holiday Spirits

Dec 17, 2012 Editorial

With the Christmas season in full swing, leading up to the frenzy of the final year-end festivities, Guyanese will once again be doing what they do best at this time of the year: “eat, drink and be merry”. The emphasis, as always, will be on the ‘drink’, since we interpret the term ‘holiday spirits” as synonymous with “alcoholic spirits”. We have no desire to decrease the spirit of bonhomie in the former usage but would like to highlight some of the deleterious effects of the latter as it relates to road accidents.
All of us have to be cognisant of the tremendous number of vehicles on our roads in recent years – eighty thousand at any one time according to our Minister of Public Works (MoPW). And that figure has to be quite conservative considering that over ten thousand cars enter the country annually, and unlike the Americans, we do not scrap our cars willy-nilly. When we juxtapose those statistics with the fact that our road mileage has remained stagnant, we begin to appreciate the challenges we face in road usage.
So imagine what happens when we place individuals who will have imbibed ‘spirits’ with even greater abandon than usual, behind the wheels of those vehicles in the next two weeks. Carnage and mayhem are two terms that come to mind. Drunk drivers inevitably mean more accidents since alcohol impairs the judgement and response time of those DUI. In the 731 traffic accidents between 2004 and 2008, there were 835 deaths and close to half of them were determined to be caused by people driving under the influence of alcohol. That was more deaths in five years than all the murders we had over the comparative period.
What makes the above statistic significant is that in 2009 the president finally signed into law the “Driving under the Influence of Alcohol (DUI) Bill” (actually the “Evidence and Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic (Amendment) Bill 2008”). This introduced the much debated breath analyser tests into the repertoire of our traffic police in their ongoing efforts to make our roads safer. But since 2009 we still have on an average about one hundred and fifteen traffic fatalities annually.
Additionally, in a study completed in December 2011, “Emergency room study on alcohol and injuries”, seventeen percent of all accident patients treated were related to alcohol use, based on the percentage of alcohol in their blood. Yet in one report, as of the end of August 2011, a total of 42,494 charges were issued against motorists but while 8,859 were for speeding only 743 were for driving under the influence of alcohol. From the evidence of the Guyanese alcohol consumption patterns, it is inconceivable that with eighty thousand drivers on the road at any given moment only a thousand could be apprehended for ‘DUI”.
What makes the statistic more troubling is that over eighty-five percent of our road fatalities are of young men. If their cohorts are not deterred from their speeding and drunk driving habits, which almost inevitably lead to their accident, our accident rates will certainly spiral upwards.  Last week, the MoPW said, “It is important for us to get to young male drivers with respect to changing the culture, their appreciation, understanding, personal responsibility and responsibility too for the person they take and transport for their own safety, and what they have to do for us to have a changed behaviour, a change in the culture, a change in the results we are seeing.”
While that may be so, the traffic police will have to be much more vigilant in enforcing the DUI law – especially in the present season. The initial fine is only $7500, which ought to be raised. For a repeat conviction the drunk driver is disqualified from holding a driver’s license for 12 months. Finally, for the incorrigible drinker who gets convicted a third time, the driver is permanently disqualified from holding or obtaining a license.
We must stop the carnage on our roads caused by DUI. No driving with spirits.

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