Difficult day

He's fired for a DUI he got while off the clock?
That seems crazy.

 

You can absolutely be that drunk and not be an alcoholic. We've all had those nights (not the driving part, but certainly the drinking part).

 

Not crazy at all. If he's a reporter, he's going to have to drive to assignments. That puts him on company time and insurance, and it makes him an insane liability risk.

We've all been there, or at least 95 percent of us have. So anything that's said about this can come off as hypocrisy. But this country needs to start taking a hard hard line on this particular crime. Out here in California, there was a proposal to equip cars with Breathalyzers linked to the ignition for people with multiple DUIs. The bill stalled because of a furious lobbying effort by Anheuser-Busch and other distributors.

 

Most likely a stipulation of the newspaper's insurance company. DUI = poor risk, regardless of whether he was working when it occurred. Some actuary somewhere determined that people who get DUIs are more likely to expose a company to liability, and some court somewhere agreed.

 

Not saying I agreed with the judge. And as it turned out, this guy never repeated the cycle, at least not that I know of.

Same traffic court judge once lectured me about a speeding ticket on a particular road because his grandchildren live in the area.

 

This.

Awful that it happened to a friend, but that can NEVER excuse his lapse in judgment.

 

I'm sure it's an insurance issue.
It's just the kind of thing that bugs me.

 

We've all been there? I'm 30 and I've never driven drunk. It's not that hard a thing to avoid.

 

That's good of you. Maybe I was a bit high with the 95 percent, but I would bet a good 80-90 percent of people have been guilty of this offense at one time or another. I really believe it's one factor that prevents us from getting serious about it. The other factor, as I mentioned, is that we have the friendly alcohol companies safeguarding our freedoms.

 

Still way too high. People who do things like this tend to way overestimate how common it is, because the people they are around have probably done it as well.

 

I don't know. I like to think I lived a pretty standard life in my early adulthood -- four years of college, then a full-time job, going out once or twice a week -- and I can't think of a person who wasn't guilty of this at least once. By no means did I hang out in a hard-drinking, heavy-partying set; the people have grown into responsible adults, and these days when we get together we barely even drink, let alone drink and drive.

It'd be great to be wrong on this, but I'd be very surprised if 20 percent of the population over age 25 could honestly they had never gotten behind the wheel at .08 or higher.

 

I agree. I'd say at least 80-90 percent of people who drink on a semi-regular basis have probably driven at a point where they wouldn't pass a breathalyzer. We're not talking drive-the-wrong-way-down-the-highway drunk here. 0.08 isn't hard to hit.