In the middle of the heaviest drunken-driving season of the year, Maryland officials Wednesday honored the 179 people who died in alcohol-related crashes in 2007 and unveiled the 42 recommendations of a task force to combat the problem.
The key recommendation by the task force, which included highway safety officials, police, citizen advocates and representatives of the alcoholic beverage industry, was the formation of a Maryland Alcohol Safety Action Program, modeled on a successful program in Virginia that has reduced repeat offenses.
“It’s important to get people right from the beginning,” said Thomas Dewberry, Maryland chief administrative law judge who served on the task force. Dewberry said the judges in his unit handle 15,000 alcohol- and drug-related Motor Vehicle Administration cases a year.
Drunken-driving laws need to be stiffened as the task force recommends, Dewberry said, but the state needs to intervene with more treatment than punishment.
“You take away their license, you put them in jail, but they still keep drinking and driving,” he said. “They’ve got an alcohol problem, and we’ve got to stop them from drinking.”
The MASAP would produce wider sharing of data, better agency coordination, more education and enforcement combined with better treatment. The program would be funded by fees from offenders and “divert thousands of offenders annually from costly incarceration in local jails, thus realizing substantial savings to the state,” the task force report said.
“There is a lot of movement behind the scenes to treat drunk driving differently,” said Kurt Erickson, president of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, who served on the task force. Another task force member, Joe Sikes, former chairman of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and whose daughter Alisa was killed in a 1992 drunken-driving incident, said the new program would “comprehensively address the problems of drinking and driving. It would get people help.”
Del. Bill Bronrott, D-Montgomery, chairman of the drug and alcohol abuse committee, said, “The odds of getting caught are very slim,” so when someone is caught, he likely has been out drinking and driving many times before.
“You need intervention, assessment and treatment so that is not entirely a punitive process,” Bronrott said.
But police will be out again this year with their sobriety checkpoints and drunken-driving patrols that produce about 25,000 DUI arrests annually, said Bernadette DiPino, Ocean City police chief and president of the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association.
DiPino said the checkpoints “helped reduce traffic crashes by 20 percent.”
Last year, 4,820 people were injured in alcohol-related crashes in Maryland, a 5 percent drop from 2006.
