Reasons why you shouldn’t do drunk driving for your own safety
**A contributed post as written for The Safe Driver by Irene Wall.
Most – if not all – social gatherings these days aren’t complete at all without any alcoholic beverages served, especially if there aren’t any kids invited. After all, alcohol can make you easily shed your inhibitions which can help you ease into a conversation with a random person that you feel like talking to, especially if you’re mostly aloof and withdrawn when sober. However, if you want to drive yourself back home instead but you’ve already had one too many drinks, you may meet your maker faster than if you didn’t drink at all. To educate you about the dangers surrounding drunk driving, here are some reasons why you shouldn’t do it for your safety:
- Drunk driving makes you sluggish, and impairs your vision and hearing.
If you think that alcohol is a stimulant since it turned you into a chatterbox at some social gathering, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, the sudden burst of energy that you feel after having a few drinks is only temporary as you’ll then experience an equally sudden drop which would find you starting to get sleepy.
- As a driver, you’re required to stay alert and focused all the time whenever you’re taking your vehicle out on the road. Drinking alcohol strips you of the alertness and focus that you need once you’ve gotten yourself behind the wheel as you’re most likely to feel too drowsy to drive.
- No matter how much alcohol content there is in a drink that you decided to take, the mere fact that you consumed alcohol can cause your vision to get blurry until all you see is black and your hearing to turn muddled until you can’t hear anything at all.
- Temporarily losing your vision and hearing to alcohol while driving is a surefire way to send you and your car crashing into another vehicle, a fixed object, or some property as two of your primary senses aren’t working as they should.
- Drunk driving gets you in trouble with law enforcement.
Getting into a legal quandary that you may not be able to get out of that easily is the very last thing that you want to happen to yourself. However, you might have forgotten all about that when you drank alcohol at a social gathering and gave yourself the best time of your life, which can instantly take a turn for the worst the minute you decide to do drunk driving.
- Most roads these days have closed circuit cameras where traffic personnel can watch every single driver’s movements via a monitoring station. The minute that they see you aimlessly swerving along some road, they can send law enforcement to flag you and make you pull over to the side of the road for questioning.
- The police officer or officers that flagged you would then ask you to do some sobriety tests as well as exhale through a breathalyzer for them to find out if you’re in good shape to drive or not.
- If the police officer or officers find out that you’ve got a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent or greater than that, you’re going to get arrested and charged with DUI – or driving under the influence (of alcohol).
- Your now arresting police officer or officers will then send you to jail where you’ll have to sleep your drunken stupor off until you’re sober enough to get yourself a lawyer.
- Drunk driving endangers not only your safety but that of everyone else on the road as well.
Drinking and driving not only puts your life on the line. It places the lives of others at great risk as well regardless if you’re driving along a road with only a few people and other vehicles in it or a crowded one packed with pedestrians.
- When you’ve hit someone with your vehicle while you’re under the influence of alcohol, you may inflict unwanted physical injuries on them, the worst of which may lead their limbs to get amputated and thus make them physically disabled for life.
- Thus, doing drunk driving is the most selfish decision that you’ll ever make in your entire life. If you care about the safety of both yourself and other people, you shouldn’t drink and drive at all. Or if you can’t completely stop yourself from drinking alcohol, you should take a cab on your way to some social gathering and back home instead.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one person gets killed in a vehicular accident involving a drunk driver every 51 minutes. That statistic may sound morbid to you, but that makes you realize that driving under the influence of alcohol deprives people of the right to live longer lives. Thus, the above-listed reasons should convince you to not do drunk driving at all for your safety. But in case you drink and drove and got yourself in a terrible accident, you’ll want to contact a lawyer as soon as possible to help you have your DUI charge reduced and get your driving privileges back.
If you’re looking for appropriate legal advice regarding the matter, you can click here.
Irene Wall
Irene Wall has been writing about law for more than a decade. She writes pieces on various legal topics that she hopes could help the 
common reader with their concerns. She enjoys playing basketball with her sons during her free time