DUI Poll
 

The comment in the politics thread about a DUI not being any special reason to quit drinking got me to wondering. Just how many here have gotten A DUI? I never have, but I'll confess to you that in my college years there were times when I know I deserved one. I just never got caught. Now, I'm older and wiser and don't party like I once did, and I realize that I took some risks that were really unacceptable to the older, sadder-if-not-wiser person that I am now. Even back then, a DUI would have really shook me up. Would you feel the same or do you think our current drinking and driving laws are too strict?

Just discovered that this got posted last night - it kept telling me to go back and re-do the poll, so I thought none of it had posted. Sorry for the confusion. The poll should now be available somewhere above in the forum.

I have never had a DUI.

I typically go to great lengths to ensure that I will not be driving with a BAL beyond the legal limit.

I have issue with the "feelgood" move that reduces the legal limit from .10 to .08, like PA has done recently. It doesn't really mean a damn thing, when it comes down to it, but makes it more likely that not really intoxicated people are going to get busted.

Uh,...where's the poll? :confused:

Bruce, you are so picky!

And what are you doing up at 4:28 am, anyway? ( :blush: Yeah, me too.)

Never had a DUI, mainly cuz I don't imbibe alcohol at all.

Scary as it sounds, I think 0428 is when bruce is getting up for work.

I, on the other hand, often go to bed then.

Like Mari, I certainly deserved DUI while a youngster. I am much more careful now and the thought of perhaps injuring or even killing someone keeps me sober behind the wheel. I did have to go to court once for failure to maintain appropriate distance and that was enough for me.

In OH if you are convicted of DUI you must get special bright yellow car plates that say DUI in RED on them. I think that is over the top. Why not special plates for convicted sex offenders? It's all so maddening.

Would those plate covers protect against photo radar?

*has an idea*

*gets a beer*

I think it's a confessional, not a poll.

If you're not raised Catholic it's easy to get confused between the phone booth o' sin and the voting booth.

i got a dui when i wasn't driving one time.

i should have gotten a dui a couple of times when i was driving.

it hasn't affected my life much other than some legal fees and some time in county lock up.

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the dui laws aren't really getting dangerous drivers off the streets. they are simply generating revenue for the municipalities. ever since the law changed to .08 it is easy to find the cops - just look one block in each direction from the bar districts. they are simply parked there getting lots of .08 and .09 dui's instead of being out on the roads looking for reckless drivers.

I've never been busted, but I've sure driven with more than .08; that's pretty much one decent beer for someone of my weight.

(and with PA's rule about extrapolating backwards from the measured BAC to the time you were stopped, you can be nailed for DUIwith just about nothing in your bloodstream.)

I drove a couple times in my early 20s when I might have had enough in my bloodstream to get a DUI. Whether it was luck, or a lack of actual impairment that kept me from being pulled over, I can't say. But I never drove when I considered myself to be drunk.

I was a passenger on two occasions when the driver was clearly drunk. I was drunk too, so my judgement was poor. The first time, everyone got home safely. The other time, the driver decided to take a shortcut across the soccer field at school. Nobody remembered that there was a 5 foot drop between soccer fields. A few people got some nasty bruises when we landed, and the field was left with a huge divot. His Bronco was able to drive away without any problem except for a slightly cracked windshield and some sod in the grill. That was the last time I ever rode in a car with a drunk driver.

I am much more responsible now (and for the last 15+ years.) I don't drive if I've had more than one drink. I also never get drunk anymore. Three drinks is about my maximum in an evening.

You lose .08/hr once your BAL starts going down. Thing is, you can't know your BAL is on the downside unless your'e tested more than once. I've seen people climb as much as .10 in the space of fifteen minutes when they've been in my custody and clearly no longer drinking. Nothing will beat the chick that went from a BAL of .000 to .230, all on Listerine consumed in the lobby bathroom. She sneaked it in with her. No metal or foil on the bottle to set off the metal detector, and we don't do a pat-down search unless we really, really need to.

I a responsible person anyway, but I do find that carrying a firearm is an excellent deterrant to excessive alcohol use. I don't get loaded if it's loaded, so to speak.

I enjoy the spirits from time to time but I always take cabs home. I even live in a town where i have to call and wait for a cab to come get me (about 1/2 an hour) It causes no worries and lets me have as good of a time as I want. I drove drunk once in college (nothing bad happened) but I promised myself I would never do that again

My alarm goes off at 4:10 am. :(

[quote=wolf]You lose .08/hr once your BAL starts going down. Thing is, you can't know your BAL is on the downside unless your'e tested more than once. QUOTE]

And this is why PAs retroactive extrapolation rule gets you in trouble. Suppose you're busted and they take you down to the station and you blow a 0.05 an hour later. They then extrapolate backwards to the time of the stop and come up with a seriously illegal 0.13 (I think the figure they use is less than .08/hr but the problem exists regardless). Problem is, you were actually at, say, 0.04 when they caught you, but going UP. You peaked at 0.07 and then started going down. So you were never illegal but you're still going to jail.

How about drugged driving? One could be busted for driving with thc in their system from a joint they smoked 2 weeks ago. Is traffic safety really the concern here? Then why isn't the Prozac user also busted?

Wisconsin Drugged Driving Law Challenged in Court

Drugged driving is much harder to prove, I would think. Drug urine screens just detect presence of a substance without providing any information about amount or time of usage, just so long as the substance is still at detectable levels. Even the blood assay results that confirm still don't give you a lot of data to work with.

We've all seen the scene in the movies, though, where the stoner rolls the window down and the cloud of pot smoke billows out toward the cop ... no doubt there. (Yes, this really happens in real life, although the effect is not as dramatic.)

I didn't know about that extrapolating back stuff. Interesting. Once it was winter and I'd been sitting in my car with the windows just barely cracked because of the cold, and using a solvent to remove some icky gung that a child had spilled all over my car. I finished the job and drove my car up to a spot where I used to like to go for walks. I walked maybe 100 feet from my car when the police drove up and waved me back to inform me that I was tresspassing on private land (the property had changed hands and the new owner was a Nazi). I had forgotten my license and they couldn't find me on their computer, so they took me down to the station to run me from there. At the station they gave me a BAC test and it came up something like .02 - must have been because of those fumes. I'd had nothing to drink for literally days. But I suppose they could have extrapolated back that somewhere in the day I started out with a picture of margaritas. How can that extrapolation stuff be legal?

.02 could be within the standard error for the particular machine. Also, if they don't calibrate them right, AND they don't reset them properly after use, it is possible to get false readings from an AlcoSensor. Which is why breath-tests are not admissible in court ... but likely why the blood draw from the ER (and the subsequent extrapolation to BAL at time of the offense) is.

The alcohol limit here in Australia is 0.05, and has been for many years. We started off at 0.08, but that only lasted for a few years. Learner drivers and provisional drivers (restricted license for three years), must have a zero level (I think it is officially 0.02 to allow for cough medicines, etc.).

I didn't drink and drive even before breath testing came in (must be about 30 years ago now), but I have given up the evil booze entirely, so I don't have a problem with it anyway these days.

I must admit that sometimes I still feel like a drink. I miss my wine, especially.

Me, too. Never gotten a DUI, but that's only because I never got caught back in the day when I was partying. Speaking of which, I can't even remember the last time I had a drink--wait, yes I can....two years ago on my birthday I had a margarita.

Now, as to the special car plates, sure, I think it's a good idea. And as for plates for the other bad guys, why not? We have sex offender registries, for instance. I think if you see a sex offender tag on a car parked at the local playground, you're gonna watch your kids a hell of a lot closer.

It's a shame that things are getting to this point, but with everything out there protecting the criminal, and with the fact that they aren't drooling through their fangs, we should be able to have some way of identifying them in order to protect ourselves. I for one would be far more careful driving around a person with a drunk-driving tag. I'd make sure I kept far away from them on the road.


Sidhe

That leads me to speculate about a brand on the forehead that would only become visible when a lunatic's meds were below therapeutic level that would read "insane."

When I drank steadily, there were very few weeks when I didn't drive drunk at least two or three times. Miraculously, I never got a DUI. I even got stopped once driving home shitfaced from my convenience store job back in the 80's, and the cop just told me to slow down after running my license and plates to make sure I was a good guy. I think what saved me was that I still had my Quik Trip smock on and we always gave the cops free stuff.

I don't miss the fear that I always had, though. Sobriety has numerous benefits.

I got a DUI when I was 18. The left blinker was out in my VW bug. There was an opened bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor (from the night before) and I'd actually left the party early to drive home and be good. HA! My blood alcohol level was .001 over the legal limit, which resulted in over a year of bus hell and many years of expensive auto insurance.

Needless to say, it never happened again.

Oh, imagine the possibilities:

Quietly desperate women in bars at 2:00 am whose foreheads say "Fertile"

Quietly desperate men in bars at 2:00 am whose foreheads say "Liar"

Dangerous looking teenage boys who aren't attending school (and who are ineffably appealing to your teenage daughter) whose foreheads say "Stupid"

I love this idea!

Hot damn, I want one of those tags if it will keep people away from me on the road. Hell, I'd wear it around my neck in the mall since they won't let me carry an Uzi anymore. :D

If you are legally carrying in PA (so you'd need a Class III plus a CCW) the only thing they could charge you with in the mall is trespassing ... and that's only if you refused to leave after you were discovered to be carrying. And that only applies if there's a "no weapons" clause in the "Mall Code of Conduct/Courtesy."

(Yes, I asked a cop about this one. His best advice ... "If you have something going on, and you really have to shoot someone, try to do it out in the parking lot. It will be less hassle for you.")

I've heard of new drug testing policy for people on probation. A new thing is not only drugs and alcohol make you come up hot, but over- hydration can send these ones back to jail or prison as well. Is being too hydrated against the law? New law says yes. Makes me think of my old wild nights out with my gallon of evian. How lucky I was to not be caught leaving the gym.....Water logged and feelin' good.
Take a bite outta crime.

I want to know how having an excess of water in your system is supposed to set those things off and pose a public threat. It oughta be the other way around...severe dehydration can make you see things and that's not good when you're driving.

I think the idea is the assumed reason for being over-hydrated is to clear drugs out of the system. Just one more turn down the slippery slope to totalitarianism.

Oh sure - makes sense. If you drank a quart of cranberry juice an hour and a half before a pee test, it would surely test clean, because all you'd be peeing out is water. Same would go for coffee, or tea, or any other diuretic.

And on the other side of the spectrum....I wonder how they would test you if you drank without really drinking. It's called AWOL (alcohol without liquid).

Things that make you go hummm.... :eyebrow:

On the illegal hydration spectrum...are you healthy or evading a hot pee test? Are you quitting drugs and alcohol and substituting with water or caffeine? Or are you trying to pull one over on the ol' probation officer. Who is to say? The penalties are too stiff for these people for the state to be nit- picking. I'm interested in this one...I want to see their hydration scale and what could be deemed illegal. What of athletes and pregnant women? A sliding scale possibly? Obvious evasion or rehabilitation? Are these new state mandates so clever? :eek: I'm with you Cyber. Dehydration can be a nasty thing seeing as how hydration is a matter of survival. Sometimes I find that when people are (being) so clever they look their most ridiculous. :p

Interesting alcohol delivery device. I also read years ago of another way to get alcohol into your bloodstream. The enema. Not sure what the benefits of it are. Maybe it's less filling. It seems dangerous though. Like you could absorb too much too fast and get poisoning.

Uh...tastes great? (sorry, couldn't let that one go...someone had to say it)

I can remember one night when I was still living on a motorcycle.
Drunk on my ass and raising hell like somebody from an old motorcycle show....
(Plenty of noise on my dirt bike and lots of wheel stands.....)

...got stopped by 6 Sheriff deputies and a State Trooper.
(Yeah, I really knew all of them)

The only smart thing I did was go home when they gave me the chance to....

*Motorcycles for "me" was several life times ago....
Some of the time that was good and some that was best left forgotten.

Wow, I'm amazed that Australia has tougher DUI BAL rules than the US.

I've never been DUI, I started and pretty much ended drinking in college, most of it on-campus (18 was legal in NY).

My son has been stopped by cops and has tested clean every time. He is sometimes the designated driver. However, being under 21, if you are transporting alcohol you can have your license suspended. My son has failed to search some of his friends, which has led to difficulty. He met someone who was a few months shy of 21 who ended up in community service because his 21-year-old girlfriend had left an unopened can of beer on the floor.

Since we are here in PA, I like to draw my examples of public behavior from our public figures in teaching my son about responsibilty. In this case, I like to use one of our own state officials as an example. Thomas W. Druce is a fine example of what not to become.

Of course, Druce got an amazingly light sentence in a prison hospital, as well as having his license temporarily restored. My son is enough of a realist to realize that these perks will not be available to him if he screws up that royally.

BTW, even Ira Einhorn , Pennsylvania's most famous fugitive, is pissed off about Druce.

As for the DUI poll - I had two (in my younger years), but never got charged with one. The first time, I was the manager of a restaurant and the beer license was in my name, so I really had to get out of the DUI charge. I hired a lawyer who took the Chief of Police to lunch and got him to agree to not make the arresting officer appear in court if I plead not guilty. He then made sure that the court date was on the officer's day off, as the officer's wife worked nights, and the officer would've had to hire a babysitter for his kids in order to go to court that day, and court was held in a town 20 miles away. I plead not guilty, we went to court, the officer did not appear, and the judge dropped the charges. The lawyer wasn't cheap, but the DUI wouldn't have been cheap either, and I could've lost my job.
The second time, the judge reduced the charge to reckless driving after I attended six weeks of DUI classes. (This seems to happen to here women much more often than men.)
After that, I was older and wiser enough to not drive drunk. I also had a child after the second time and that stopped my partying for the most part.

Ever since the District Attorney here was forced to "retire" after being charged with two DUI's, things have tightened up inside town anyway. Fortunately, by that time I had given up the hard stuff for medical reasons, and will have nothing to worry about if I'm caught in one of the DUI roadblocks. But for the most part the other folks have not put 2 + 2 together and keep blissfully weaving their way right into them, even though the locations are published in the paper the night before, proof that some people are just too dumb to stay in the gene pool. Around here, it is considered hazardous duty to be on a Caltrans crew at night, I've been told that every 10 minutes they get a major fright from some drunk driver hurtling off the road right at them like moths to a flame.

Lookout123 will appreciate the drive-carefully advice I was given when I moved to Arizona. I was told that half the vehicles on the road were motorized wheelchairs steered by a senior citizen and in the other half the driver is drunk. After driving for 11 years there, I have to admit that the seniors gave me far more bad moments than the drunks ever did.

Although I could never explain why, I've never had a DUI (or DWI, as they're called in Missouri), or even been pulled over. EVER. There are times when I've certainly deserved it, though, say back when I was around the age of 20. I would go out and get *really* drunk twice a week, and always drive home. Most of the time, I couldn't even remember driving home. It's definitely odd that I never got caught, considering the regularity with which this happened, and the way they feel about drunk driving in this town. People that have ridden in my car on these occasions say they either didn't know I was drunk or didn't notice, so I must just have been lucky.

For the most part, I never drink and drive anymore, with the occasional exception. And even then, I don't have any more than a few drinks in me. It's not that I think I couldn't handle it (because come on, inside most of us, we think we really can, regardless of our abilities), but I know I have no right to do it, when it means putting other peoples' lives in danger. I never know what might happen.

When I was 21, I once drove home (about 10 miles from bar to bed) after having 34 draft in about 4 hours. I was so drunk I fell asleep with my clothes on. My dad came into my room about 8:30 the next morning (it was a Wednesday night) and I thought I must have driven the car into the lake or into my neighbour's livingroom. He was just after the keys, and the car was parked perfectly. I felt so stupid the next day that I have never driven since after having more that 1 beer. I figure someone was looking out for me that night, so I owe them a favor...I could have killed myself, or someone else.

My friend finally got busted after going about 2 years laughing at his good luck at having 5 beers after work then driving home. His insurance almost doubled the next year, and he lost his license for 12 months. Hope it was worth it!!

I have only driven under DUI level of alcohol once in my life. The night I met my ex was at a wedding, and at the reception I drank heavily because I thought I would have a better chance at being social. (It didn't really work, but somehow we [stupidly] got together anyway.) At the end of the reception it was judged that of three guys with the hotel room 2 miles away, I was the most likely to achieve the drive correctly. At 2am, in Sayre PA, there are no other cars on the road anyway.

When i was in Cali in the early 80's i drove DUI almost constantly , I still can't beleve i didn't get busted , i got stoped LOTS but there was always some reason i got away with it , oh and the Carl's jr roast beef sandwich with jalapenyo patty may have had Something to do with it , take that NASTY hamburger sized jalenpnyo patty off , eat the roast beef sando' , when the cops pull you over gobble that bad boy down and SCORCH their hair off with your breath !!!!!
Now when i got home i got BUSTED bigger that shit , the breathalizer came up saying " One at a time , Please !!!!"

I've had 2 DUIs only one I can give a reasonably valid reason for 1 (ie my mother had just died and well... I got shitty.. although I know I shouldn't have driven) for the most part though I think it's a bad idea. haven't had more than 3 beers and driven in the past 3 years. so that's my 2 cents

One of the great things about living in Bangkok is that the police are given their instructions for the day which they follow to the letter.

Ie. Look for people not wearing seat belts.

So one could be DUI or have a car full of driugs and if you've got a seat belt on. It's thank you have a nice day. Oh sorry sir your road tax has expired. Please be sure you renew it as soon as possible.

Other than that, one DUI or DWI. So long ago its in the past. Did it change my life. Yes, I joined the merchant marine. Hello handsome man you like buy me drink?

Got one, deserved more. Trying not to repeat the experience -- CO has some pretty heinous DUI laws.

I got stopped once with a glass full of rum, cofee and sugar in my cupholder. I only drank 1/4 of it, so I wasn't buzzed, but the cop was looking at the glass funny, and I must have had some smell on me. Then he found out where I work and started chatting with me about how there's a police function there next week, have a good night, etc.

I've driven very drunk before, but not since I've been married. Now Arsen does the drinking and driving. He has a pretty strong tolerance. One night, we got absolutely shit-faced at his russian friends' place. We were driving home and got pulled over. The cop says "have you been drinking tonight" And Arsen says "Not really". Oh my god, NOT REALLY? There's a commercail on tv showing people getting arrested for DUI. In the commercial, the cop asks the guy the same thing, and the guy on tv says "not really". I was like WTF Arsen?! But for some reason, he let us go.