Why our region lags in the DUI fight

They were full of youthful idealism. More than 350 high school students swarmed Harrisburg last fall, giving legislators empty beer bottles stuffed with proposals to make beer kegs traceable. With them came volunteers from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, handing out black stress balls that said, "Get Behind the .08 Ball."

Then, as the students watched wide-eyed, people from the state's wineries arrived, visiting legislators' offices and delivering bottles of wine.

Eight months later, the keg bill is stalled. So is the proposal to cut the blood-alcohol content limit for drivers from 0.10 to 0.08. And while the wineries say they don't care about the 0.08 bill, its backers see the gift bottles as a symbol of why lawmakers in Harrisburg and Trenton don't do more about drunken driving: the alcohol industry's clout.

"What can we take them to promote our cause?" says Felicity DeBacco-Erni, head of Pennsylvanians Against Underage Drinking. "An urn of a child's ashes?"

The debate over how to combat drunken driving is not always polite.

Research abounds - from studies on whether a 0.08 limit would save lives, to surveys asking convicted drunken drivers where they had their last drink, to work on an injectable, slow-acting drug that might someday help alcoholics beat their addiction.

Among experts, there's a rough agreement on one thing: There is no magic wand. Not 0.08, or keg laws, or police sobriety checkpoints, or prison terms for driving under the influence, or alcohol treatment can by itself curb this crime and the tragedies it causes.

But a broad, combined effort can drive the numbers down again, say those who have studied the issue.

"We have made a lot of progress in the last two decades," says Alexander C. Wagenaar, director of the alcohol epidemiology program at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health. "We could cut the death rates again, perhaps in half, if every state and community fully implemented things we know would help."

For some researchers and advocates on this issue, that makes it all the more frustrating to see inaction on something as modest as going from 0.10 to 0.08. Most European countries have already gone to 0.08 or lower; Sweden is at 0.02. Japan is 0.0.

But in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, even the big carrot-and-stick of federal highway money has not yet made the difference.