Kurt Erickson is president and chief executive officer of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program.
How did you get involved in WRAP and alcohol education overall?
My previous tenure was with the American Lung Association in heading up its Northern Virginia office. The attraction of combating drunk driving: Every drunk driving incident is 100 percent preventable. It is therefore a completely winnable public health issue, versus lung cancer, that may be affected not just by tobacco smoke, but genetically or environmentally, and so forth. It’s not that it’s not a worthy issue, but it’s not always directly causal to something you can control.
What’s the toughest part of this job?
It’s the randomness of drunken driving … it’s soul-deafening. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says a third of people will be directly impacted by drunk driving at some point in their life … if you walk out your front door, it’s either going to be your neighbor to your left or to your right or it’s going to be you. What’s most difficult to deal with, even if you have every confidence in your own ability not to drink and drive, unfortunately, that confidence doesn’t extend to all the drivers around you.
Even if these things are preventable, does it get frustrating because human behavior is so hard to change?
Of course. And you have a new crop of drivers that share the roadways every year that you need to hit with the same message. The opposite side of that is we are making progress. Nationally, we’ve had a tremendous decline in drunk driving over the last 20 years … you’ve had drunk driving in the Greater Washington area virtually cut in half.
Are you worried about the renewed discussion about a lower drinking age?
I actually welcome that. As an organization, we are very firm in support of the age-21 statutes. But that said, I think it’s very healthy to open a debate on this very issue … the science on this issue is so fundamentally supportive of the age 21, the amount of lives saved, and I just haven’t seen the science that shows me there is going to be a societal benefit to lowering it to 18.
