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Washington Alcohol DUI Deaths In Decline

Washington's alcohol-related death toll is down 66 percent in the past two decades.

WASHINGTON - Washington state's alcohol-related traffic death rate has dropped by more than 66 percent since 1982.

That rate of improvement over the 20-year period was 16th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study found.

"We have made some progress in the last 20 years in reducing DUI collisions," Washington State Patrol Capt. Glenn Cramer said in a telephone interview from Olympia.

But there's room for improvement.

"Drinking drivers kill more people than are murdered in Washington," Cramer said.

There were 179 homicides in Washington last year, while 243 people were killed by drunken drivers, he said.

"That's why the Washington State Patrol works so passionately to reinforce the DUI laws," Cramer said, noting that troopers had arrested 16,412 people so far this year for such violations - about 4,000 more than were busted during the first 11 months of 2001, a 32 percent increase.

"Those people that make those individual decisions to drink and drive put our families, our friends and our children at risk," he said.

In 2001, Washington had 0.52 such deaths per million vehicle miles, the national report found - down from 1.54 deaths per million vehicle miles in 1982.

The 243 alcohol-related traffic deaths in Washington were a little more than a third - 37.4 percent - of the 649 total state traffic fatalities.

In 1982, the state's 442 alcohol-related traffic deaths were 58.4 percent of 757 total traffic fatalities, according to data from the state Traffic Safety Commission.

The national agency compiled the state-by-state statistics to encourage states at the bottom of the rankings to get tough on drivers who drink. The agency and law enforcement in every state say they will crack down on drunken and drugged drivers with sobriety checkpoints and increased patrols from Dec. 20 through Jan. 5, the kickoff to a yearlong effort to curb impaired driving.

DUI - driving under the influence, with a blood alcohol level of 0.10 or more - was at issue in 366 deaths in 1982, 48.3 percent of the total. That number improved to 182 last year - 28 percent of the total.

Cramer and other officials attribute recent reductions in alcohol-related traffic deaths to the Legislature and Washington's tougher blood-alcohol threshold - tightened from 0.10 percent to 0.08 percent in January 1999.

Director John Moffat of the state Traffic Safety Commission credits the state's tougher DUI standard with saving 100 lives since 1999.

"Laws have definitely gotten stricter, and obviously enforcement has gotten a lot stricter, too," said commission spokesman Mark Medalen.

The commission is working with the State Patrol on its "Get Hammered, Get Nailed" campaign, providing $300,000 for advertising and $400,000 for law-enforcement overtime to ensure there is manpower to look for impaired drivers, Medalen said.

"Also, it's not socially acceptable any more" to drink and drive, he said.

Public awareness of drunken driving's toll, raised through the efforts of such groups as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, has helped inspire that change.

MADD was founded in 1980, a year when drunken driving was blamed for about 30,000 deaths, by two Sacramento, Calif., women whose children had died in such accidents.

"It just started snowballing," said Wayne Smith, director of MADD's state office in Lacey. "Back then, the system was not responding to the needs of victims."

In addition to pressing for tougher laws and penalties, MADD has been monitoring court proceedings for years to ensure judges and prosecutors are "living up to their oaths of office to protect our society," Smith said.

"It was amazing, the turnaround" that resulted in some courtrooms from the monitoring effort, he said.

Smith said his office had just received a $300,000 grant from the state and federal traffic-safety panels to develop an updated court-monitoring program.