Comment & Debate
“EDITORIAL: Sobriety Stops: Inconvenient process much like airport checkpoints, only with a higher chance of saving someone’s life.” The Lufkin Daily News. December 9th, 2010: “No Texas motorist, we imagine, is excited about the prospect of having to stop long enough to let a state trooper determine if you’re driving drunk. It’s a similar frustration as the one we have with the invasive body scans and patdowns at our airports, with some major differences: 1) You don’t have to worry about someone seeing you naked or touching your junk, and 2) the odds of preventing an innocent person’s death are much, much higher. The first life that a Texas sobriety checkpoint saves is the one that makes the inconvenience worth it.”
Herb Robinson. “Sobriety Checkpoints: The Lazy Way.” Seattle Times. February 11th, 1991: “Rivara says, an opinion survey conducted late last year for the state Traffic Safety Commission showed that nearly 54 percent of Washington adults approve of sobriety checkpoints. Why the medical profession’s continuing pressure for deterrents to drinking? Mostly because booze accounts for far too much of the burden borne by hospital emergency rooms. At Harborview, for instance, 45 percent of those admitted for injuries of all kinds, ranging from traffic accidents to domestic violence, are terribly drunk when they are brought in. And fully half of this group are people with chronic alcohol problems. ‘Other kinds of drugs get most of the attention,’ says Dr. Abe Bergman, Harborview’s director of pediatrics and a point man for the medical association in Olympia. ‘But what we see in the emergency rooms more often than not involves excessive drinking.'”