A Stitch in Haste

The Washington Post has a sob piece about a woman who drank and drove and got busted for — surprise — drinking and driving:

Debra Bolton had a glass of red wine with dinner. That's what she told the police officer who pulled her over. That's what the Intoxilyzer 5000 breath test indicated — .03, comfortably below the legal limit.

She had been pulled over in Georgetown about 12:30 a.m. for driving without headlights. She apologized and explained that the parking attendant must have turned off her vehicle's automatic-light feature.

Bolton thought she might get a ticket. Instead, she was handcuffed, searched, arrested, put in a jail cell until 4:30 a.m. and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
...
"I think it would have been fine if I'd done something wrong, but I didn't," she said. "I had a glass of wine with dinner."

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Stories like this pop up every so often, and supposed libertarians get amazingly upset over it.

And I can never understand why.

Establishing a blood alcohol content ("BAC") threshold for DUI offenses does not imply that any BAC below that threshold becomes a safe harbor or is "no big deal." People are not (or should not be) allowed to game the system by guesstimating how much illegal drinking and driving they can get away with before they face criminal penalties.

The very conduct of drinking — in any amount — and driving is not only reckless behavior (in the tortious liability sense) but also criminal behavior. The offense is not "driving with a BAC over 0.8" but rather "driving under the influence."

This is not to suggest that the government is entitled to become as totalitarian as it wants simply because "drunk driving is bad."

If your complaint is that breathalyzers are unreliable at such low tolerances and give too many false positives, then fine — that's a legitimate issue.

If your complaint is that "DUI Mania" leads to dubious practices such as suspicionless searches and random roadblocks that are not only ineffective but also constitutionally suspect, then fine — that's a legitimate issue (though not in the case of Ms. Bolton from the WaPo story — she was pulled over quite properly for an unrelated infraction).

But if your complaint is that DUI laws deprive you of your supposed constitutional right to have "just two beers" or "just one glass" and then hurl a multi-ton slab of metal down public roads at lethal speeds, then you have exceeded the threshold of logic and are no longer driving while libertarian.

Hat tip to Another Gay Republican.