Drinking and driving: the leisurely approach.

Drinking drivers cause some 1200 deaths a year-about one-fifth of all deaths on the road-and one-third of all drivers killed have a blood alcohol concentration over the legal limit, a proportion that rises to two-thirds at night. These figures, published in the Government's recent consultation document on drinking and driving,' are much the same as those given in the Blennerhassett Report of 1976,2 which was prompted by the failure of the Road Safety Act 1967 to maintain its dramatic impact on deaths and serious injuries related to drunken driving. The proposals made in the consultation document are largely based on the recommendations of the Blennerhassett Committee. Thus the most surprising feature of the present report is why it has taken so long. The reforms now proposed (subject to public comment) are mainly welcome. The present offences of driving while impaired by drink and driving with an alcohol concentration above the prescribed limit would be merged into a single "impairment" offence, with an excess alcohol concentration as an "irrebuttable presumption of impairment." Procedural requirements would be reduced to a minimum in the new legislation and present loopholes would disappear-for example, arrest on the wrong grounds would not invalidate proceedings. The proposed use of breath testing as the normal method of providing evidence should greatly simplify matters. The proposal, however, that a suspect should have the initial option of providing a blood sample but could not ask for blood analysis once the breath alcohol concentration was found to be over the limit comes as a surprise. It runs counter to the Blennerhassett Report's recommendation, and indeed to the system successfully operated in Northern Ireland for the last 12 years.3 The Government's argument is that once the legal limit is specified, as it proposes, in terms of breath (40 ,tg alcohol '100 ml breath) as well as blood alcohol an acceptable blood concentration would be no defence against an unacceptable breath concentration. But this view takes too little account of the variability in the operating conditions of breath testing or of the physiological variability among individuals,4 which could lead to both unwarranted convictions and unwarranted acquittals. In Northern Ireland the law is still framed in terms of blood concentration alone; and after the breath concentration has been found to exceed the legal limit there is the option of asking for blood analysis, a valuable safeguard in borderline cases. More discussion and more study of the scientific evidence are essential before final proposals appear.