Does Justin Bieber think he's Michael Jackson? What does this odd photo say?

Earlier this afternoon, Justin Bieber broke two days of silence on Instagram -- interrupted by his arrest in Miami Beach for drag racing, DUI, and resisting arrest -- to post this photograph of himself as he left the court house:

Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson: via Instagram

It's possible that the Canadian teen heartthrob has juxtaposed his photo with that of the former King of Pop is simply that he saw aesthetic similarites. The two photographs have similar composition and framing, and they both benefit from a certain black-and-white chiaroscuro.

I think, however, it is more likely an expression of the Biebs' feeling victimized by "The Man," just as MJ was before his grisly, drug-induced death.

After all, the caption Bieber put on his photo -- which has been "liked" more than 513,000 times -- was:  "What more can they say".

I'm not sure I could have put it better myself.

Combating Drunk Driving Without Compromising Liberty and Safety

(This article originally appeared on Virginia Politics on Demand on May 28, 2013.)

This past Memorial Day weekend marked the start of the summer driving season, and with it came warnings about drunk driving and other traffic hazards.  As Hoai-Tran Bui reported for WTOP radio in Washington:

Memorial Day weekend is one of the most dangerous holidays of the year for drivers.

Kurt Erickson, with the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, says there's a significant increase in drunken driving deaths during Memorial Day weekend.

In 2011 (the latest year that data is available), 406 people lost their lives nationwide during the three-day weekend, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

"Forty percent of all traffic fatalities that happen in this country over Memorial Day were actually caused by drunk drivers," Erickson says. "That compares to 31 percent during the other parts of the year."

The good news in Virginia is that, overall, Memorial Day traffic accidents declined this year, according to Doris Taylor at WTKR-TV in Hampton Roads:

Officials say the state of Virginia had a major decline in fatalities on Memorial Day Weekend this year. They investigated about 620 crashes that resulted in 141 injuries and 7 deaths.

The number of deaths dropped into the single digits this year, the first time since 2009.

Preliminary reports show that seven people lost their lives this weekend in traffic accidents all over the state including one in Newport News, Carroll County and Southampton.

Police also stopped 11, 9900 [sic] speeders and 2,609 reckless drivers. Officers were able to arrest 137 drunk drivers.

These statistics arrive in the context of a recent call by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to revise the definition of drunkenness for purposes of arresting drivers who are "under the influence."

With the utopian goal of "reaching zero" drunk-driving fatalities, the NTSB recognizes in a report released May 14 that

the number of lives lost annually in alcohol-impaired-driver-related crashes declined 53 percent, from 21,113 in 1982 to 9,878 in 2011; and the percentage of highway fatalities resulting from alcohol-involved crashes is down from 48 percent in 1982 to about 31 percent today.

Despite this notable record of success over the past three decades, however, the NTSB recommends that, although "the majority of alcohol-impaired drivers in fatal crashes have BAC levels well over 0.08,"

the 50 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia establish a per se BAC limit of 0.05 or lower for all drivers who are not already required to adhere to lower BAC limits.

The Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman explains the practical effect of adopting this recommendation:

From the standpoint of individual behavior, that would be a significant change. A 180-lb. man could be legally impaired if he had three drinks in an hour (versus four drinks today) while a 140-lb. woman could earn a set of handcuffs with just two drinks in an hour (compared to three under the current rule).

Some 20 years ago, when the Virginia General Assembly was considering a bill to lower the blood alcohol concentration threshold for drunk driving from 0.10 to 0.08, I testified before the Senate Courts of Justice Committee (then chaired by Arlington Democrat Edward Holland) alongside Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

We both argued against a change in the law, pointing out that revising the technical definition of impairment downward would simply redistribute law enforcement resources without actually preventing any drunk-driving incidents. Lightner said that educational efforts and changes in the culture -- that is, changing people's attitudes about the acceptability of driving while intoxicated -- would be more effective.

Lightner also said:

Half of the drinking drivers involved in fatal crashes have a BAC of 0.17 or greater. Even among young people aged 16 to 24, the great majority of deaths involve drinkers with a BAC of at least 0.15 percent. Lowering the blood alcohol content won't make a difference to these offenders.

I drew on research that probably still holds true:

Minnesota Judge Dennis Challeen, who over the past 30 years has sentenced hundreds of people for DWI violations, agrees with Lightner. "Most drunk driver fatalities," he notes, "have BAC levels close to 0.20, twice the legal limit. If lawmakers reduce the limit to 0.08, they are simply catching more of the wrong people, the people who are not the problem."

Judge Challeen further argues that stricter laws will be ineffective because those who do not need to be sanctioned -- law-abiding citizens and responsible drinkers -- are most likely to be "self-correcting," while chronic drunks and scofflaws are least likely to respond to harsher penalties.

The fact is, by changing the definition of drunkenness, we enable the police to arrest more people. That may seem tough, but the effect is clogging the courts with people who are not really the problem, creating conditions whereby truly dangerous people are let off without punishment so that we can make room for the minor offender.

The author of Confronting Drunk Driving, Professor H. Laurence Ross, estimates a potential increase of 60 percent of DWI arrests under the new definition with the possibility of no decrease in fatalities. "Adoption of 0.08 percent BAC has not to date been accompanied by any comparable new investments in police resources," Dr. Ross reports, "thus diluting an already inadequate control system. The effect may well be to reduce the chances of any impaired drivers being arrested."

Candy Lightner argued then that

Rather than put our limited resources into laws that fail to address the real problem, we need better enforcement of existing laws and proven policies that have demonstrated a significant impact... If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road. Putting our trust in new laws and regulations that only address the tip of the iceberg will not make our highways safer.

That point is echoed by Steve Chapman in his reaction to the NTSB's most recent recommendations:

Under a tighter BAC, the same number of cops will be chasing a lot more offenders. An officer who is busy arresting someone with a .05 level, who poses a small danger, will not be able to arrest someone with a .10 or .15 level, who poses a huge danger....

It may come as a surprise to hear that the organization that deserves much of the credit for raising public awareness of the problem, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, has declined to endorse this proposal. It prefers to focus on greater efforts to enforce existing laws, while requiring ignition interlocks for every DUI offender.

NTSB acknowledges this last policy would save some 1,100 lives per year -- far more than a lower BAC would save. It also has the virtue of disabling the few guilty without inconveniencing the many innocent.

In a free society, trying to reach zero carries too high a cost. Better to settle for making progress.

Utah was the first state to change its BAC definition to 0.08 in 1983. Other states followed slowly on their own initiative, but it was federal carrot-and-stick incentives that eventually forced the rest of the country into uniformity, regardless of the effectiveness of the legislation on solving the problem it purported to address.

While we will hear protests from state capitals -- including Richmond -- against the NTSB's most recent recommendations, it won't be long before Congress acts and threatens to withhold federal highway funding from any state that does not go along with the proposal. It's only a matter of time, and it won't save any lives or property.

Video Interview with Garrett Peck

On Friday night, I was able to nab an exclusive interview with Arlington-based author Garrett Peck, who was in Charlottesville to speak about his new book, The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet, at the Barnes & Noble book store at Barracks Road Shopping Center. Earlier in the day, Peck had spoken in Lexington to a group of VMI cadets at his alma mater and to other area residents.

I first encountered Peck a few weeks ago when I was in D.C. on business. Stuck in traffic on Interstate 66 in mid-afternoon, I tuned to the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU-FM. The conversation was about alcoholic beverage regulation -- a topic that has long interested me -- but it wasn't until the end of the interview that I learned the guest's name and that he was scheduled to speak that night at the Arlington Central Library. Since the library was just a few blocks from where my car would be parked, I decided to attend the presentation.

Peck's talk was interesting and entertaining. (It was accompanied by a slide show with images of the temperance movement and drinking culture.) When he mentioned that he would soon be in Charlottesville to talk about his book, I made a note of it.

That's how I found myself in the religion section of Barnes & Noble last evening, sitting with Garrett Peck and asking him questions about alcoholic beverage regulation, the drinking age, regional differences in attitudes toward alcohol consumption (and preferences for types of beverages), and other topics touched upon in The Prohibition Hangover.

The interview is in two parts of about seven minutes each, both also available on YouTube.

The first part includes introductory material. The second part addresses the most controversial question -- should the drinking age be lowered back to 18 -- and the efforts of groups like the Amethyst Initiative.

Part I:

Part II:

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The Dangers of Voting

Since I drive around a lot on Election Day -- moving from precinct to precinct, visiting each of Charlottesville's eight polling places, plus the Central Absentee Precinct and the Office of Voter Registration and Elections -- it was a shock to find. out that the most recent scientific studies show that Election Day is hazardous for drivers.

According to HealthDay News:

Driving or walking to the polls on Election Day is a longstanding political tradition in the United States, but new research suggests it might be more dangerous than you think.

After crunching traffic fatality numbers, researchers discovered that Americans were about 18 percent more likely to die in accidents during polling hours on presidential election days than on other Tuesdays.

The increased risk is greater than it is on New Year's Eve or Super Bowl Sunday, the Canadian researchers added.

Reporting on the study, Patti Neighmond of NPR interviewed the study's principal author, Dr. Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto, for Morning Edition:

"We studied all the U.S. presidential elections over the last 32 years, beginning with Jimmy Carter in 1976 and ending with George Bush in 2004," he says of the research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Redelmeier studied the U.S. in particular, he says, because this country maintains excellent statistics on vehicle crashes, noting exactly what time of day, when, where, vehicle, type and other information. He compared the number of crashes, injuries and deaths on Election Day Tuesday to the Tuesdays before and after.

His research revealed an 18 percent increase in motor vehicle deaths on voting day. "This equaled about 24 people [deaths] per election," Redelmeier says, adding that "this was remarkably consistent across different locations and years."

Redelmeier also found that about 800 more people suffered disabling injuries as a result of the crashes. These injuries and deaths far outnumber those reported during times associated with an increase in drinking and driving, such as Super Bowl Sunday and New Year's Eve. Unlike on those days, Redelmeier says, alcohol didn't seem to be an issue on voting day. And the crash rate didn't increase in the evening, when people might be more likely to drink.

An extract of Redelmeier's original article can be found on JAMA's website; subscribers can see the full article.

100,000

Yesterday this blog experienced a milestone worth noting. According to SiteMeter, the 100,000th visitor (since December 22, 2004) brought up this site on his or her computer screen at about 4:15 p.m. (EDT) on Sunday, April 1, 2007.

The lucky seeker was from Philadelphia and used Google to find information about "candy lightner and BAC and 0.08" (but did not put the phrase in quotation marks). Google asked whether he meant "candy lightner and BACK and 0.08" but the answer was no.

To my surprise and delight, a page in this blog was the first listed on the results Google returned. Number one among about 247 search results was the page under the topic "drunk driving," which includes a post I did on May 31, 2005, entitled "Misplaced Drunk Driving Priorities." That post features a reprint of an article I published in 1997 called "A Wrong-Headed Change in Drunk Driving Definition" and also makes reference to the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Candy Lightner, who once joined me at a legislative hearing in Richmond at which we both opposed a change in the definition of legally drunk. That change, which made a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 percent the legal limit rather than the older limit of 0.10 percent, eventually became law both in Virginia and nationwide, despite our efforts.

It is just a coincidence, but visitor number 50,000 found us almost precisely one year ago, on April 2, 2006.

Meanwhile, over at I'm Not Emeril, Alton is hosting the Virginia Blog Carnival and has some very nice things to say:

Rick Sincere, Charlottesville's premier Libertarian blogger and theater fiend has recently returned from New York. While there he naturally took in a show or two. Actually, that was the purpose of the trip. These reviews, like all of his reviews, are as good as it gets. Go see Report from New York, even if you do get a chance to make it to one or more of the shows.

Thanks, Alton! If I ever compile my theatre reviews into book form, that blurb goes on the back cover.

Misplaced Drunk Driving Priorities

Today's Washington Times carried a lucid op-ed piece by John Doyle, executive director of the American Beverage Institute, pointing out how some law enforcement efforts to combat drunk driving are misdirected and therefore ineffective. These are feel-good rather than substantive measures.

Oddly, the article does not appear on the Times' web site, but I tracked it down at the Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it appeared May 7. (Both newspapers indicate that the article first appeared in the Providence Journal-Bulletin in Rhode Island.)

Doyle begins with a scenario that reflects reality for a lot of Americans:

WITH SPRING blooming, you decided to treat that “special someone” to a romantic dinner at your favorite restaurant. The evening had started off well enough. A fine meal. The perfect companion. A bottle of wine. The two of you hadn’t driven far from the restaurant when you saw it: a police roadblock.

No problem, you thought. All you did was split a bottle of wine over a long meal. Since you weigh 180 pounds, your blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) is .03 percent at the most. And the legal arrest threshold is .08 percent — more than twice yours.

Unfortunately for you, police have begun arresting people with a BAC at just a fraction of the legal limit. One Florida man recently ended up in jail for driving with a BAC of .02 percent — the equivalent of about one drink. The grandson of a former Supreme Court justice, who’d had a little wine with dinner, was arrested in Washington with a BAC of .03 percent. And just a few months ago, a Florida man who admitted he drank a few beers hours before spent a night in jail even though his BAC was a flat .00 percent. These are more than just isolated incidents. They are harbingers of a growing trend.

Doyle traces this ludicrous, authoritarian trend to the obvious source:

Politicians looking to make names for themselves are advocating even tougher controls. Lawmakers in three states have gone so far as to call for the installation of breath-testing devices in every single car. If they have their way you won’t make it out of the parking lot until you test yourself; whether or not you drink is irrelevant!

Doyle points out that this trend of targeting the least-dangerous drivers (light and moderate drinkers who are not impaired) has not produced the results that the politicians desire:

In December, Congress ordered an audit of the nation’s drunken-driving programs after noting that we have seen “no discernible progress” over the last six years. That’s the same period during which the noose has tightened around responsible drinkers. In addition to multimillion-dollar “zero-tolerance” advertising campaigns, the legal limit for drinking and driving was lowered from 10 percent to.08 percent BAC.

An honest look at the evidence will lead government auditors to conclude that this approach has failed, and that the real problem has been reduced to what Mothers Against Drunk Driving calls “a hard core of alcoholics.” These people will not be persuaded by PR campaigns, and according to government research they go out of their way to avoid highly publicized roadblocks.

More than ten years ago, I testified before a Virginia State Senate committee on what was then a proposal to reduce the "legal limit" in Virginia from 0.10 percent blood alcohol content (BAC) to 0.08 percent. I was accompanied on that occasion by Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), whose sensible opinions on how best to combat drunk driving had led to her being ostracized by her former comrades-in-arms.

At about that time, I wrote an article that was published in several newspapers. An early version of this article appeared in the Northern Virginia Sun in December 1993. The version reprinted here appeared in The Metro Herald in March 1997:

A Wrong-Headed Change in Drunk Driving Definition
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Abraham Lincoln was fond of asking his listeners, "If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does he have?" Someone would always answer: "Five." "Not so," Lincoln would admonish them. "Just because you call a tail a leg doesn't mean it's a leg. It's a tail just the same."

So it is with members of Congress who seek to be seen as "tough on drunk driving" by changing the legal definition of drunkenness. By using a carrot- and-stick strategy against states that do not do their bidding, Congress would force state governments to do what the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to do: Write and enforce drunk-driving laws.

Under legislation introduced on March 6 by Representative Nina Lowey (D-N.Y) and Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), states would have to reduce their legal intoxication limits or lose part of their federal highway construction funds. Lowey and Lautenberg claim at least 500 alcohol-related deaths could be avoided yearly if all 50 states adopted a 0.08 percent limit on the amount of alcohol in a driver's blood. Most states currently have a blood alcohol content (BAC) limit of 0.10 percent.

This misguided approach will have no discernible effect on traffic accidents but instead will waste precious law enforcement resources and give politicians a warm feeling that they have "done something."

Definitions have little to do with actual impairment on the road. According to Dr. William Hotchkiss, former president of the American Medical Association, 83% to 97% of people tested were considered physically impaired at BAC levels of 0.10 to 0.15. In the same study, up to 86% of persons at a BAC of .05-.10 are not physically impaired. This is why a 0.10 BAC has become an accepted standard.

An unexpected opponent of the 0.08 BAC is Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). She says: "Half of the drinking drivers involved in fatal crashes have a BAC of 0.17 or greater. Even among young people aged 16 to 24, the great majority of deaths involve drinkers with a BAC of at least 0.15 percent. Lowering the blood alcohol content won't make a difference to these offenders."

Minnesota Judge Dennis Challeen, who over the past 30 years has sentenced hundreds of people for DWI violations, agrees with Lightner. "Most drunk driver fatalities," he notes, "have BAC levels close to 0.20, twice the legal limit. If lawmakers reduce the limit to 0.08, they are simply catching more of the wrong people, the people who are not the problem."

Judge Challeen further argues that stricter laws will be ineffective because those who do not need to be sanctioned -- law-abiding citizens and responsible drinkers -- are most likely to be "self-correcting," while chronic drunks and scofflaws are least likely to respond to harsher penalties.

The fact is, by changing the definition of drunkenness, we enable the police to arrest more people. That may seem tough, but the effect is clogging the courts with people who are not really the problem, creating conditions whereby truly dangerous people are let off without punishment so that we can make room for the minor offender.

The author of Confronting Drunk Driving, Professor H. Laurence Ross, estimates a potential increase of 60 percent of DWI arrests under the new definition with the possibility of no decrease in fatalities. "Adoption of 0.08 percent BAC has not to date been accompanied by any comparable new investments in police resources," Dr. Ross reports, "thus diluting an already inadequate control system. The effect may well be to reduce the chances of any impaired drivers being arrested."

This proposal will raise costs to taxpayers, waste resources and energy, and cause a bureaucratic and legal morass that will not be balanced by better highway safety.

MADD's Candy Lightner makes the point best when she says: "Rather than put our limited resources into laws that fail to address the real problem, we need better enforcement of existing laws and proven policies that have demonstrated a significant impact." She adds: "If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road. Putting our trust in new laws and regulations that only address the tip of the iceberg will not make our highways safer."

I agree. Our focus should continue to be on education -- the fact that alcohol-related highway deaths are down from nearly 25,000 in 1982 to 23,000 in 1988 to about 17,000 in 1993 is evidence that social disapproval and education are working -- and on tough enforcement of existing laws. Congress should, therefore, turn back any efforts to change the definition of drunkenness nationwide from a BAC of 0.10 to a BAC of 0.08. All that will do is illegitimately extend the federal web into the proper legal domain of state lawmakers.

A decade on, it's hard to believe that the situation we're dealing with -- irrational, feel-good "solutions" that do little to address the core problem -- has changed so little. It's also hard to disagree with John Doyle's conclusion in his newspaper column:

Our collective failure to adequately deal with alcohol abusers who drive drunk should not be used as an excuse to punish moderate consumption of adult beverages. Responsible adults who share a bottle of wine with their dinner deserve privacy, not persecution.